Peter Levin on Why Trading Cards Have Become a Global Asset Class

Peter Levin says he has kept every trading card he has owned since he was four years old. He began collecting in earnest at seven or eight, after his family moved to Los Angeles and he swapped his allegiance from the Yankees to the Dodgers. He spent his allowance on baseball card packs when the ice cream truck came through the neighborhood, while other kids bought snow cones. Today he estimates his collection at well over 500,000 cards.

Levin is also a founder and managing director of Griffin Gaming Partners, a Santa Monica venture firm focused on gaming and adjacent fields such as sports. He co-founded Nerdist Industries, which sold to Legendary in 2012, and he chairs the board of Scott Coker's new global MMA league. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he spoke as both collector and investor, which is a combination worth keeping in mind as you read his claims.

His case starts with how much commercial activity now surrounds cards. Hasbro's Magic: The Gathering has crossed over with Final Fantasy, God of War, Fallout and Tomb Raider. Levin adds Street Fighter and Fortnite, and a recent Hobbit set. Hasbro has also signed a multiyear licensing deal with Upper Deck for Transformers and G.I. Joe cards, starting with a 40th anniversary Transformers set at Target in mid-September. Disney has deals with Topps, with Hasbro for Marvel and Spider-Man Magic sets, and with Ravensburger for Lorcana, which gets a digital version on PC and mobile in 2027. Pokémon has announced a series, Pokémon: Wild Card, about a trading-card player striving to be a champion.

The money figures are large. The Wall Street Journal called Pokémon cards a hot investment with a 3,000 percent return a year ago, ahead of the S&P 500. A Cyberpunk card game raised $28 million on Kickstarter this year, a record for a game and the fourth-biggest campaign on the platform. Some analysts put the market at $50 billion a year. Levin says Magic is closing in on $2 billion a year for Hasbro. He says that if the world ended tomorrow, Pokémon cards would be the global currency the next day.

Levin names several forces behind the growth. Grading companies such as PSA, CGC and TAG, which uses machine learning, score cards from one to 10 and seal them in protective slabs. He argues this turns sentiment into a standardized, financeable asset with a mark-to-market price. He also points to the "kidult" buyer: adults make up just under 30 percent of global toy sales, and their spending rose 18 percent in 2025. Many of them are nostalgic and now have disposable income.

He credits social media too. Logan Paul sold a Pokémon card for a record $16.5 million this year, and Levin says tens or hundreds of millions of people watched the auction. He cites DJ Steve Aoki, TikTok, Instagram and the live auction platform Whatnot, recently valued at $20 billion. In 2023, a One Ring card from a Lord of the Rings Magic set sold for $2 million. He says One Piece is growing faster than any card game ever, Pokémon included, helped by a Netflix live-action series.

Levin acknowledges the market has stumbled before. Oversaturation caused a material dip, and 1990s scandals over overproduction were chronicled in the book Card Sharks. He says the industry learned and recovered, and that he bought through the dips and tried to avoid hyperbolic cycles. He says he rarely sells, though he trades duplicates at shows such as the LA Card Show and the National Sports Collectors Convention.

The open question is whether today's growth avoids the oversupply of the past. The interview ends mid-answer, and the loudest advocate here is a collector with money in the field.