Someone Already Sold Tiger Woods' Birthday Card?!

Plus More Backyard Breaks Controversy and The Blindboxification of Everything

Author

Evan Parker
February 05, 2026

Collectors, there’s a good chance you know the name Josh Luber.

Maybe because you’ve bought or sold a pair of sneakers on StockX, maybe because you read about him in these pages as I was crowing about his collectible toy brand, ghostwrite, which Mantel partnered with to create the trophies for The Mantel Hobby Awards. Or maybe you got back into collecting after reading his 2021 white paper, Trading Cards Are Cool Again, which predicted the sports card and TCG boom.

Well Josh is back with another white paper, The Blindboxification of Everything — dropped yesterday — where he predicts that the sports card trend of blind boxes/repacks will infiltrate all corners of consumerism, because of the dopamine hit the experience of opening something with an unknown reward creates.

It’s provocative, entertaining and insanely well-sourced, and Luber even includes a blind box in the paper itself- a footnote written 17 different ways by 17 different authors, with a new one appearing every time you ‘reopen’ the box.

I may nor may not be one of those guest authors, so click the link, read the doc, and check out footnote 39, and open the box for yourself.

Credit: Sports Illustrated

At his private 50th birthday party, Tiger Woods gifted attendees a red-themed surprise: an exclusive Upper Deck card limited to 415 copies, autographed and only distributed at the event. Designed by DC Comics legend Jim Lee, it riffs on Woods’ iconic 2001 SP Authentic rookie auto. I’m sure Woods hoped the cards would be a cherished gift, held onto by all attendees forevermore, but alas, one has already been sold, netting $27,600 just this week. Let’s hope the seller brought Woods a nice gift for the birthday bash.

The 2025-26 NBA All-Star Game is going USA vs. World, but as we’ve been telling you, the card market is focused on liquidity. Mantel ranked the ten All-Star starters by SLAM Score, a proprietary metric that measures how quickly and frequently their rookie cards sell. Wembanyama, unsurprisingly, leads the pack, followed by Luka and Curry. Brown, Brunson, and Maxey may offer sneaky hobby value relative to their on-court output. And if any of them have a big game and end up MVP, expect to see those SLAM scores rise.

The Backyard Breaks drama isn’t going away, says Cardlines. Collectors were limited to 2 boxes of 2025/26 Topps Chrome Sapphire via EQL lottery—but BYB landed 100. Then they pulled an absurd haul: Wemby autos, Cooper Flagg golds, a mountain of 1/1s. It came days after a class action suit accused Topps of manipulating product contents, and as Fanatics faces heat for alleged favoritism. Throw in shill bidding accusations, and the hobby’s most controversial breakers just got a whole lot more radioactive. And yet… people still buy in. That’s the hobby in 2026.

Credit: Rolex via WOE

When Alex Honnold scaled Taipei 101 without ropes last week, watch nerds noticed something unexpected: a Rolex Explorer II on his wrist. Honnold, famously minimalist and anti-luxury, isn’t an official Rolex endorser, but does host a branded podcast tied to their Perpetual Planet campaign. The pairing feels contradictory—an elite tool watch worn by someone who climbs without even wearing a watch. And yet, according to WOE, it works. Honnold might be the brand’s most authentic modern explorer, reminding us what Rolex used to represent before red carpets and celebrity cameos.

Let’s talk Super Bowl. Or, at least, pretend to. Because as J.R. Fickle says, unless you’re holding quarterbacks or hitting gold vinyls, football cards are kind of a snooze. Still, if the Patriots win, Drake Maye cards will spike — QB + Boston = collector catnip. If Darnold wins, he’ll need a monster game to escape the Trent Dilfer Zone. But Fickle is fading both and scooping backup QBs on the cheap: Trey Lance, Malik Willis, Mac Jones. That’s where the upside lives. We’ll check back in next year and see how that strategy paid off.

Tom Brady’s post-retirement business play is heating up. After acquiring a 50% stake in CardVault last year, Brady has helped the company rapidly expand its footprint, growing to eleven stores, with the twelfth (and largest) set to open February 7 across from Oracle Park in San Francisco, one day before Super Bowl LX. With this flagship store, Brady continues to merge sports stardom with memorabilia muscle.

Credit: Reuters

A production error turned a festive Lunar New Year toy into an accidental viral hit. The “crying horse,” originally meant to smile, now wears a droopy frown, resonating with China’s overworked youth and igniting a buying frenzy. Embraced as a symbol of workplace fatigue and “ugly-cute” charm, the plush has completely sold out, and vendors are rushing to restock. It’s no uglier than a Labubu, right?