A Chat With Peter Levin

Peter Levin is not only a founder and managing director of Santa Monica-headquartered venture capital firm Griffin Gaming Partners, which is known for investments focused on the global gaming space and related fields, such as sports. He is also, among other things, co-founder and chairman of the board of former Bellator boss and Strikeforce founder Scott Coker’s new global MMA league. And he has long been a passionate collector of trading cards.

In fact, the former CEO and co-founder of genre and pop culture media company Nerdist Industries, which sold to Legendary in 2012, owns what he says are 500,000-plus trading cards.

The intersection of video games and trading cards has been a hotbed of activity and collaborations. Case in point: popular crossovers between Hasbro’s collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering and such gaming franchises as Final Fantasy, God of War, Fallout and Tomb Raider. 

Similarly, collectible cards and card games were in the spotlight at Gamescom in Cologne in August, with attendees streaming to booths handing out special cards, such as Upper Deck cards for Tencent’s Honor of Kings, amplifying brands. 

Hollywood has also taken note of what is on the cards. Pokémon, the world’s top card game, recently unveiled Pokémon: Wild Card as the Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco wrapped. The main character will be a Pokémon trading-card game player who is “battling and striving to be a champion.”

Or how about that big multiyear global licensing partnership between Hasbro and Upper Deck to produce trading cards and tabletop games for such iconic IPs as Transformers and G.I. Joe. The first offering: a Transformers 40th anniversary trading card set, launching exclusively at Target in mid-September.

Among Hollywood powerhouses, Disney has been busy looking for new ways to leverage its popular intellectual property and reach audiences with tactile and community-oriented experiences. Part of that has been playing its (trading) cards right. The company has struck deals with Topps for Disney, Marvel and Star Wars products, Hasbro for Marvel and Spider-Man versions of Magic: The Gathering, and Ravensburger for the Disney Lorcana card game. At D23, the conglomerate unveiled a Disney Lorcana digital game, bringing the hit card game to PCs and mobile platforms in 2027.

You may have so far ignored cards as a collectibles craze that will turn out to be a house of cards. But Levin continues to be enthusiastic about them, both from collectors’ and investors’ perspectives. After all, even The Wall Street Journal touted Pokémon cards as a “hot investment with a 3,000 percent return” a year ago, as their value gains beat the benchmark S&P 500 stock index. And a Cyberpunk trading card game, based on the popular video game of the same name, earlier this year set a Kickstarter record by raising $28 million, becoming the most-funded game and the No. 4 most successful campaign ever on the crowdfunding platform. Some analysts have estimated that the trading card market is worth $50 billion annually – with further growth ahead. 

So, The Hollywood Reporter picked Levin’s brain, as a collector and investor, about what has been driving the interest in trading cards, how baseball and other sports cards differ from those for Hollywood and game characters, why this is not only for fans with high income, and what you need to know to hold all the cards.

I want to start off by asking how you got into collecting cards and how long you’ve been doing that for?

I have every card I have ever owned since the age of four, but I really started collecting at the age of seven and eight. I was a Yankees fan, and then a Dodgers fan, which was a problem. I moved to Los Angeles at the age of seven, and in those years, the Yankees were a big deal, but I switched allegiance to the Dodgers.

I started collecting baseball cards from the time the ice cream truck would come around. The other kids in the neighborhood would get their snow cone or ice cream, and I would use whatever allowance I was given to buy packs of cards. I amassed, at a young age, a tremendous amount of baseball cards. Later, I started collecting basketball cards very rigorously.

During my early days at CAA, we represented Topps, which at the time was by orders of magnitude the largest company in the trading card space, and so I had access not only to their product but also to their executive team and learned a lot about the industry. Then, Upper Deck came into the market and became a new dominant player.

I heard there was a bubble or so at a point?

There was a material dip in the market because of an oversaturation of product. There were also some scandals in the ’90s around overproduction of some of the brands. There was even a book written called Card Sharks [by Pete Williams], which spoke to that.

But to the credit of the industry, they really learned from their mistakes. And slowly but surely, the trading card hobby built its way back. And at this point, I’m a proud owner of well north of half a million trading cards. I bought through the dips in the market and have tried to avoid the hyperbolic cycles. If you have the collector gene, you’ve got the collector gene.

For people like me who know only the basics about cards, do you put them into plastic or plexiglass covers or so?

Grading services have become a big part of the trading card ecosystem over the last two decades. They are provided by such companies as PSA, CGC and TAG, which uses “machine learning,” or “AI.” Those are really the three largest players, with different approaches to how they grade trading cards and comic books. They are graded between one and 10, and that then gives you the ability to buy, sell, and trade them.

Once graded, the cards are put into a plastic slab, so they are UV-protected to a degree. You don’t want to put them in direct sunlight.

The grading has created a secondary market for these items, right. So it has given a mark-to-market, if you will, for these cards.

Given your collector gene, do you sell many cards?

Unfortunately for my wife, as a collector, I have a difficult time selling. I’m fine trading, though. I like going to trading card shows. There are some great shows here in Los Angeles – the LA Card Show, the Burbank Card Show, which interestingly takes place in Anaheim. The Burbank Cards shop is one of the biggest card shops, if not the biggest, in the world. There’s also Collect-A-Con, Anime Expo, and of course, San Diego Comic-Con, Fanatics Fest and the National Sports Collectors Convention that takes place in Chicago.

I do like to bring my cards there to truly ascertain what is the current mark-to-market for these cards. And if I have duplicates, which I often do, that’s when I’ll trade. So, I have my list of desired cards, and I’ll go trade with vendors.

Have cards become a global thing, or is it mostly a U.S., North American or Asian hobby and asset class?

We actually get asked that a lot. It has very much become a global phenomenon, and much of that has to do with the bifurcation of two parts of the industry. You’ve got sport, really driven by football – or soccer, for us. Football has driven the international expansion of trading cards with regard to sport faster than than any other vertical. And then, the second are the trading card games, and that’s really Pokémon emanating from Japan.

Pokémon is a global phenomenon. I’m absolutely convinced that if the world suffered an apocalypse tomorrow, the following day the global currency would be Pokémon cards. Pokémon cards are beating the S&P 500 by 3,000 percent. Emanating from Japan, it really took hold around the world in the late ’90s and early 2000s. It then had a zenith moment and then a nadir moment, and ever since then, it’s been on a parabolic growth curve. And that really has driven the international market expansion for trading cards.

People seem to sometimes start with Pokémon, but it seems nowadays there are all sorts of other brands, too. What’s your take on that?

Yes, it has created this incredible umbrella, under which the propagation of brands like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, and One Piece has been possible. One Piece today is on a faster growth trajectory than any card game in the history of card games, including Pokémon.

One Piece is based on a manga, which then parlayed into a wildly successful anime. Now, you have a live-action series on Netflix, which has been incredibly well received, but the trading card game is just on a parabolic growth curve.

And in between Pokémon and One Piece, you’ve got Magic: The Gathering, which began in the early ’90s and was a niche at the time. Now, it has become an absolute juggernaut that is closing in on being a $2 billion-a-year piece of business for Hasbro.

Tell me a bit about that brand’s partnerships and how that has helped propel it further?

The collaborations that Magic has done have just expanded the [total addressable market]. They have collaborated, in particular, with gaming intellectual properties and some fantasy sci-fi intellectual properties. So we’ve seen these worlds collide – trading card games coupling themselves and partnering with intellectual properties from the world of gaming. Magic alone has partnered with Final Fantasy, God of War, Street Fighter and Fortnite, among many others. Most recently, they just shipped a The Hobbit set, which thus far looks like it’s incredibly well received. [In 2023, The Lord of the Rings‘ special One Ring card in a Magic: The Gathering set sold for $2 million.]

I keep hearing that creators, such as Logan Paul, keep talking about cards. Logan Paul actually sold a famous Pokémon card for a record-breaking $16.5 million earlier this year. Has this attention from social media names helped the current cycle of opportunity in cards?

Without a doubt! Social media has been a huge draw. That sale was incredibly high-profile. Tens of, if not hundreds of, millions of people tuned in to watch that auction. If you go on any social media platform, there is a celebrity embracing cards. Steve Aoki, the DJ, is a well-known celebrator of all things trading cards. He has a massive collection and loves to show it off via social media. In particular, TikTok is a massive driver of this type of activity. Instagram is as well. And there are live auctioning platforms, such as Whatnot, which recently saw its valuation raised to $20 billion.

These famous people are huge fans of the medium. I remember when I started my firm, my team would give me a hard time about my trading card obsession. But I would say to folks: the more and more native digital we get, the more these bleeding-edge technologies take over our lives, the more people will circle back to more tactile and sticky community experiences and real-life experiences to share with others. And trading cards are a wonderful embodiment of that.

There has been much buzz about cards all around. But for those who could call you biased, given your collector bug: What other bigger trends and factors have helped boost trading cards and drive the space? And what has moved it from a hobby to an asset class that people may now want to consider?

The grading and authentication mechanisms that I mentioned have come to market have turned sentiment into a standardized and financeable asset. And it has given people the ability to buy, sell, and trade these items. So it’s opened the opportunity to really create an alternative [asset] out of nostalgia for the adult collector.

There’s a term – kidult because adults now represent just shy of 30 percent of global toy sales, and their spending was up 18 percent in 2025. You’ve got a generation that has come of age that is nostalgic for these toys, for these vintage video games, for these trading cards and comic books, and they now have disposable income. So that’s also been a huge tangible driver in the market.

And then there is the value of intellectual property, and the fact that IP rights holders in the space you cover, folks that own and control some of the biggest franchises in the world, have embraced trading cards as a medium with which to reach their audience.

Any recent examples of the appeal of cards in surprising places?

Look at what One Piece has been able to do with the Los Angeles Dodgers. They did a collaboration where a card for their primary character, Monkey D. Luffy, was handed out this year as a free promotional card during a Dodgers game that took place during Anime Expo. I went to both of those games, and they were sold out. I’ve been a Dodgers fan, but I’ve never seen longer lines at Dodger Stadium than when they gave out that trading card.

I am curious about the difference between cards you can use for games and collect and those solely designed for collecting. Is one of them more important for such Hollywood giants as Disney?

You’ve got five or six major players on the trading card game side. For example, you’ve got Disney Lorcana, which is a trading card game, but some of those cards are now also trading. If they’re graded a 10 and they’re a rare card, they’re trading in the tens of, if not hundreds of, thousands of dollars already, and that’s just a beautiful card game.

But then you’ve got Topps, which is owned by Fanatics, and they have just pure trading cards that are based on Disney intellectual property, and those also trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rarest cards.

There are some people who love the idea of playing the game and owning rare chase cards within the game and collecting those cards. And then you have people who are looking for a more passive experience. So I think Disney is a great example for where you get both ends of the spectrum.

How much bigger has Disney’s push into the world of cards been than that of other Hollywood players?

By far, Disney has been the most proactive and self-aware that their intellectual property would parlay well into the trading card form factor. You’ve got the core Disney, you’ve got Pixar and you’ve got Marvel to play with. You’ve got just a never-ending list of characters with which to interact.

The other one is Warner Bros. To their credit, because they own DC, they have also been active. Upper Deck has put together a wildly successful trading card offering with DC. And at Comic-Con this year, it was a huge hit. There were lines out of the Upper Deck booth. There was an incredibly positive fan reaction to that product.

I think you’re going to continue to see even the smaller studios, Lionsgate, for example, which announced recently that their library is going to be part and parcel of Spin Master’s Hellbreak trading card game, leveraging their intellectual property.

These companies can create delightful, contextual, authentic experiences for their fan base. So, on the whole, legacy media has strongly embraced the trading card vertical as part and parcel of their offering. When you’ve got a market that is north of $50 billion in size, it can’t be ignored. And you have a broader collectibles market on top of that, that’s worth north of $300 billion.

Any predictions for this space?

You’re going to continue to see these companies embrace this form factor because it’s being driven by both top-down, because their brand equities are so strong, but also bottom-up, because the users, the fan bases are demanding it, and they’re eating it up. The proof is in the pudding, and it’s sustainable because you’re seeing it at a very grassroots level.

I want to ask you about something related to that thought. Are cards something only for well-off people?

I love that question because it’s something that I’m sensitive to. In my youth, I couldn’t chase expensive cards. But there is this notion that you could walk into a trading card shop or a Walmart, a Costco, or a Walgreens, and buy a pack of cards, and the odds of you pulling a rare and valuable card are no less or greater than my odds. I think the democratization of that experience is what keeps the industry going because you cannot alienate a consumer who doesn’t have a tremendous amount of means or are at a different point in their life. Those packs are affordable. And companies have to make sure that the experience remains approachable.

You mentioned AI briefly. Has there been any talk about either any risk of AI diluting or of AI helping with cards or the quality of card creation and the like?

Where it comes into play really is in grading. TAG is technology-first, leveraging AI so that it removes subjectivity from the grading process.