One word has butted its way into common trading card vernacular within the past 18 months, while becoming one of the most lucrative business approaches within the hobby.
Repacks.
A repack typically contains one card — either graded or ungraded — that has already been pulled from its original pack or box produced by a trading card manufacturer. The card is repackaged by individuals, hobby shops, online sellers and larger scale companies and placed in literal or virtual mystery boxes, depending on if it’s being sold at physical location or digitally. Customers pay to open it and the card inside can range in value from less than the purchase price to far more.
Sellers of repacks predictably include hobby shops and online card box breakers. But it’s become so lucrative that major hobby power players like Fanatics, GameStop, and eBay have joined the repack marketplace.
“I think because everybody’s doing them, it’s a thing,” PSA president Ryan Hoge said. “It’s come up in some conversations with some of the larger (box) breakers out there where they were telling us, ‘Hey, sometimes half the stuff we’re selling are repacks, not new wax (packs or boxes).’”
Repacks bear cards valued at a certain ceiling point and a floor point. Some of the virtual repack operations like Arena Club, Courtyard.io and Fanatics present checklists of cards included in their offerings, as well as their market values. Virtual repacks like these present the option of having the physical card sent to the buyer or instantly sold back to the repacker for a percentage of the stated value.
“It’s better from a user standpoint,” said Nicolas le Jeune, founder of Courtyard.io. “It’s not fully scientific, but there’s a lot of people who will buy like hundreds of packs of cards and the expected value they get from it is about 20 percent. So our assumption is about 20 percent if you buy a (originally manufactured) pack of cards from the shop.”
Brian Lee, CEO and founder of Arena Club added: “Repacks in general, if done right, are a way better value for the customer and that’s how it’s become a huge, huge positive. When you’re setting floors, that still makes it feasible for everyday customers who enjoy this hobby and to find a new way to collect their cards. There’s gonna be a lot of positives.”
And business in the repacks market is booming.
In March 2024, Courtyard’s overall sales volume showed only $243,000, with the sales figures being made public through the company’s blockchain. The numbers jumped to $1.66 million in July 2024. The company’s volume rose to $9 million in November 2024. Then nearly doubled in January 2025 at $17 million. Then more than doubled one month later to nearly $43 million. Sales bounced between $40 million and $55 million the next five months. Until August.
$78.4 million.
Maybe the massive recent spike occurred thanks in part to the marketing push during the National Sports Card Convention held in Rosemont, Illinois at the beginning of August, where attendees lined up to press a button and open a Courtyard digital repack on a big screen for free. They were then immediately handed the physical card that appeared on the screen before them. Regardless, the massive dollar amount signifies just how monstrous that business arm of the hobby has grown.
And the booming repack business is having an outsized impact on the sports card market as a whole. As repack competition has grown, more and more buyers employed by repack vendors are competing with each other to gobble up millions of dollars worth of cards at shows across the country every month, offering favorable prices to dealers — even sometimes higher than recent sales for cards — sometimes buying out entire tables at the start of a show. PSA even offers immediate buyback options for freshly graded cards before it leaves their offices in an attempt to keep cards flowing to repackers.
The constant need for large quantities of cards to cycle through repacks has prompted some collectors and industry observers to speculate that the market has become largely dependent on repack buying to buoy the value of cards that wouldn’t otherwise be desirable to collectors.
“I think it’s emblematic of the enthusiasm for what’s going on right now,” Fanatics Collectibles (Topps parent company) CEO Mike Mahan said. “Whether it’s wax from the manufacturer or repack, it all starts with a great product. Otherwise, people are not going to be interested in either.”
None of this comes without red flags, though, Mahan warned.
“I think repacks in terms of the market dynamics, obviously when everybody’s doing it, standards vary,” Mahan said. “So I think there needs to be real standards, real protections for the collector.”
Many other operations lack checklists and only provide estimated ceiling and floor prices with no specific individual card values for those pulled. And like in online original manufacturer box breaks, buyers can often end up empty handed. For example, an NFL repack break could contain 10 packs but the breakers sell 32 spots (one for each team). So only 10 spots win cards and 22 spots walk away with nothing or consolation prizes of minimal value while still getting charged.
Upper Deck president Jason Masherah says he sits on both sides of the repacks debate. He sees how repacks provide liquidity for single cards in the marketplace and allows people to sell their cards and acquire cash to buy another card or another hobby product. That said, his concern for the repack industry sounds more like a warning for consumers.
“The way the repacks are being done right now is purely gambling, and it’s going to be an issue for our industry,” Masherah said. “You can’t go out, sell a product, guarantee a return, put the values of every card out there. You’re determining the values of the cards. The beauty of the card market is that we have no idea what they’re going to sell for on the secondary market. These repacks, they’re determining the value. They’re buying and selling. They’re promising a return. It is 100 percent pure gambling the way it’s being done right now, and something bad is going to happen at some point.”
References to gambling often aren’t hidden in repack breaks, or really any breaks. During a recent live-stream viewed by The Athletic, one person wrote in the chat that they had only secured three cards despite buying 20 spots throughout several repack breaks.
“Just down a couple of thousand,” the user typed.
The host of the stream then said, “For those of you who’ve been dusted tonight, here’s a chance to make a lot of it back,” encouraging those still in the stream to buy more spots in the next repack break.
Yet le Jeune believes Courtyard’s model provides a 100 percent expected value because of the “law of probability” within the odds and values set for their cards. He said the expected value of repacks being sold on other platforms is “about 50 to 60 percent.”
“So if you spend $1 million on Courtyard, and you can prove it because of the blockchain, you get $1 million of cards on average because of the law of probability at the end of the day,” le Jeune said. “We see it for some of the top users. I believe breaking has a core component, but I believe this (Courtyard’s) model (of claiming buyers break even on average) kind of disrupts the breaking industry in that sense.”
Many repackers selling cards without stated values for specific cards provided to buyers sometimes run into issues where cards won in a break can fall well below the advertised floor or ceiling prices.
One repack vendor breaking on a prominent live-selling platform witnessed by The Athletic touted its top card in a break to be worth between $3,000 and $4,000. This seller didn’t present a buyback option so the buyer had to trust the breaker’s word. To that point, someone within the live chat (not the person that won the card) asked the breaker how much he thought the card would be worth. The breaker never gave a price point and said to just put the card up for auction. The winner sold the card two weeks later for less than half the ceiling price. The selling price lined up with previous sales of similar cards, nowhere near the $3,000 ceiling threshold. After being alerted of the price discrepancy, the breaking company issued the card winner notable compensation (a 2025 Bowman jumbo box and $250 of store credit) to make up for the shortfall.
Repack sellers aren’t under any regulation to make a buyer whole in this situation. Yet there are plenty of instances where buyers have walked away from repack breaks feeling ripped off even after hitting cards because of the questionable values a breaker placed on them.
This goes into a topic numerous vendors, streaming services and card companies broached when speaking to The Athletic for this story:
Trust.
Here’s a sampling of thoughts from other notable executives within the hobby:
- Hoge: “One of the things that we saw is I think there’s good and bad repacks out there. I think that’s the issue.”
- Adam Ireland, eBay vice president/general manager of global collectibles: “It’s one of these things where it comes back to what we’ve been talking about a lot, which is trust and how do you do it in the right way. Make sure there’s transparency, make sure there’s fairness.”
- Lee: “The negative side is that there’s some unscrupulous players. You’re buying a $50 bag at this convention (The National) and you’re getting a five-cent card and that doesn’t feel good. So we’ve got to stop that and we’ve got to clean it up.”
This topic is what spurred Whatnot — one of the largest live-selling platforms — to announce new stipulations Wednesday for streamers to sell repacks or “professionally sealed surprise products,” including mandatory checklists and restrictions on a seller’s involvement in creating the repacked product. These regulations will begin in early November.
Whatnot is aiming to bring more transparency for buyers by using independent auditors to review that sellers have a publicly available checklist available for each series of their sealed products or repacks.
Whatnot sellers can no longer create repacks themselves or hold any non-public knowledge about the contents. This means a third-party vendor outside of Whatnot and a seller has to create the repack products. Those third-party vendors also have to be verified by Whatnot and the vendors have to include cards from Whatnot’s “identified product list” to ensure the quality of the cards being sold.
“I think we’re obviously very plugged in to the hobby and the community we’re always monitoring and looking at what folks are doing, and I think that as we’ve seen this (repacks) evolution, we want to make sure that what is happening on Whatnot is always a trustworthy experience,” said Eric Shemtov, Whatnot’s head of collectibles. “There’s not any clear instance or reaction, it’s more of us proactively looking at the evolution.”
PSA also recently announced a new service “designed to bring oversight, integrity, and third-party validation to this emerging space” in which they will verify checklists and randomization of repacks exclusively containing PSA-graded cards.
Mahan said repacks will remain a healthy part of the hobby business “for some time to come,” but also has room to “grow up” to make sure standards are higher across the hobby subset. Mahan also said he believes there will be fewer companies with repacks as customers flock to more reputable vendors.
For now, though, live streams for repacks are almost as plentiful as streams for traditional box breaks. And repacks are often promoted more heavily within streaming platforms than anything else, especially during evening hours, when more users with deeper pockets typically log in. And with seemingly every major branch of the hobby being tied to or creating repacks, this seems less like a fad and more like the present and future of the hobby.
“I think we’re just starting,” Lee said.
The Athletic maintains full editorial independence in all our coverage. When you click or make purchases through our links, we may earn a commission.
(Top image: eBay)