Cards
Popularity, demand for sealed boxes of wax packs has never been higher
The popularity and desirability of sealed wax might be at an all-time high.
Over the past year, prices have reflected an exponential uptick in this segment of the hobby. Collectors desire to get their hands on unopened boxes either to have a fun rip, tuck them away in their closet as an investment piece, or display them with their collectibles.
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Baseball products from 2018 that contain Shohei Ohtani rookie cards are blazing hot. In mid-June 2025, a factory sealed 2018 Topps Update hobby box, which includes one autograph or relic card, was available on eBay for $1,299.99. Fast forward 11 months and that same hobby box was listed for $3,249.99.
And it’s not just boxes loaded with current players, vintage sealed wax just keeps steadily climbing.
“Everything is hot,” said Steve Hart, owner of Baseball Card Exchange (BBCE). “It’s as strong or stronger as it was during the COVID boom, but not as ridiculous on some things. Like ’80 basketball at $90,000 a box, then it dropped to $12,000 after it was all said and done. But now it’s incrementally strong, and for no reason. People aren’t at home with nothing to do and not getting free money. So, it keeps growing and at a pretty quick pace lately. But it does seem much stronger and real than the COVID increases.”
Late last year is when Hart started seeing incremental increases in sealed wax.
“Maybe from the National afterwards all the way to today, it’s ridiculous,” Hart said.
Hart—who is known in the hobby as the go-to person for authentication of sealed wax boxes and cases—said the hottest sealed products are from all sports pre-1985, and then 1995-2005.
Baseball products from 1980-85 are doing well.
“Lots of people collected it who are now at the age where they do have expendable income, and that is the nostalgia part of it,” Hart said. “Also, pre-1981 starts to get expensive and that leaves a lot of people out. So, ’81-’85 is much more affordable, full of Hall of Famers. It was heavily produced, but definitely pre-overproduction.”
Hart noted that there is a healthy amount of sealed wax available from 1981-85, 40-plus years after they were released. People stashed away product, and now it’s seeing the light of day. However, according to Hart, the supply of wax that is unopened doesn’t seem to meet the demand.
From about 1987-92, companies overproduced cards, creating what is known as the Junk Wax Era. But even boxes from those years are having their day.
“Prices are a lot stronger,” Hart said. “But it’s still a $59 box—whereas a year ago, it was a $29 box.”
A 1985 Donruss baseball sealed box, for example, could be purchased through BBCE at the 2025 National Sports Collectors Convention for $300. About nine months later, the price nearly doubled.
Collectors are into buying random single boxes but there’s a higher demand and a higher premium paid for boxes that come directly from a sealed case (FASC). FASC is a common acronym in the sealed wax space. Hart is seeing 50%-100% increases in the prices of FASC boxes.
“That’s stronger now, more popular as people realize it hasn’t been picked, people searching for cards showing on the top and the bottom, that kind of stuff,” Hart said.
Burbank Sportscards, the largest hobby shop in the country, always makes sure it has a wide range of unopened product available in its store. But the southern California shop is struggling to keep its shelves full.
“We have showcases dedicated to more premium, older product, and it’s almost impossible to keep anything in it, whether it’s in-store demand, whether it’s our website demand,” Burbank Sportscards owner Rob Veres said. “There’s just not enough to support the demand. There’s just less and less of it, and people are realizing the stuff isn’t going down in value, so there’s just less of a desire to let go of it. They’ll try to let go of other things before they let go of their sealed product, especially if it’s BBCE certified.”
Along with the limited availability of sealed wax, Veres has felt the spike in pricing.
“For years, these boxes had stable prices. You could just put the hammer down on an ’81 Fleer box at $120, and it was like that forever. Nothing really changed; the value of the singles never changed,” Veres said. “But the difference between the value of the singles within the product and the value of the sealed product has just exponentially grown in a way that we’ve never seen before.
“I can no longer assume the price of something. It needs to be checked every single time. Usually, it’s 20 to 25% minimum more than the last time we checked. That’s a healthy sign for the hobby.”
HOT WAX
There is a combination of reasons why sealed wax has become so popular.
When collectors or breakers rip open a box, that means there is one less sealed product on the market. Also, when the price of single cards increase, that ups the value of sealed wax from that specific release.
Nostalgia is another key factor in collecting unopened product.
“Investors, collectors, graders and breakers, there’s just more demand for it than ever,” said Adam Martin, CEO of Dave & Adam’s Card World.
When Martin was a young dealer in the early 1990s, he got to know Mark Murphy, who was known as the Baseball Card Kid. Murphy was big into acquiring and selling sealed wax.
“He had a great quote, he said, ‘Every day the supply of these boxes gets lower. They’re not making anymore,’” Martin said. “You can see that with the popularity of grading and the number of breakers coming into the space looking for something unique to open, that the amount of vintage unopened over the past few years is just declining. The amount of available inventory across all years and all sports in vintage unopened is just declining as breakers and collectors open it trying to pull a card they can get a PSA 10 on. The pure economics of it are just driving the values of the boxes up.”
Nat Turner—CEO of Collectors, the parent company of PSA—is a firm believer that the price and popularity of sealed wax is correlated to singles.
“Singles have gone up times two in many cases, certainly like Jordan and LeBron and Kobe, and I think that just pulls the wax up,” Turner said. “The reason the Metal boxes are so big is because PMG Greens are big. It’s an expected value equation. People have a 1% chance of pulling X, Y, Z card, they factor that into the price they’re willing to pay for the boxes. You get entertainment value, too. That’s the missing part of the equation. I think it’s a direct derivative of the secondary market for singles.”
Martin agrees that single cards are driving the price of sealed wax.
“We’ve noticed that the ’86 Fleer basketball box had gotten soft for a while, and then just over the past few months has jumped up quite a bit, because the Jordan PSA 10s are up to like $300,000 and so the value of the boxes is going up,” Martin said. “There’s only so many of those boxes to go around.”
Turner also has a hypothesis for why some of the sealed wax from the late 1990s and early 2000s are having a resurgence. It’s called the 25-year theory.
“The people that were kids 25 years ago, it takes about 25 years for them to grow up and get some disposable income,” Turner said. “Then that stuff is nostalgic, and they start buying it. Stuff from ’99 is super-hot right now, because it’s like the end of Jordan’s Bulls era. So, like basketball cards you have a chance of pulling Jordan autos and he was obviously playing through 2002-03 with the Wizards at the end. ’03 is crazy hot because of LeBron.”
Veres has a slightly different take on why vintage sealed wax is hot.
“It’s collectors that are kind of fed up with the pricing of modern boxes and what many people feel is manipulation or returns on investment,” Veres said. “I think whether it’s vintage high-grade singles, I think they’re doing the same thing with product. They’re realizing that even a box from ’79, they just don’t pop up on the market all that often. They’re smart enough to know not to rip it, and the auction prices are just incredible.
“I think that a lot of people have maybe been disillusioned with the modern market. I think a lot of these folks are a little bit older, have a little bit more disposable income and these products remind them of their youth, which I think is a driving factor as well.”
Veres is seeing interest in unopened product across the board from all sports and trading card games (TCG), especially Pokémon. He believes basketball and TCG are pretty equal at the top. As for the four major sports, the order of popularity has basketball No. 1, followed by baseball, football and hockey.
Burbank Sportscards is always buying unopened product that comes through its doors, even if it’s a case of overproduced 1991 Fleer baseball, noted Veres.
“It’s exciting to us because there is a demand for junk wax and junk packs and things at price points that have the memories that make sense,” Veres said. “It’s like if you bring in ’87 Topps baseball boxes and put them on the shelf for $75, they go a lot quicker than almost any other product in the store. It’s all those 45-year-old guys. That was their childhood, those woodgrain borders and the excitement over the Wally Joyner card or the [Rafael] Palmeiro and obviously the [Barry] Bonds’ and the [Mark] McGwires. A lot of people have been priced out of ripping new product and are forced to go into inflated breaks, and this is something that gives them joy.
“The funny thing is the mass is what’s crazy. So, ’87 Topps is coming up on its 40th anniversary, which is wild to think about. And you think about back in ’87 that would be the equivalent of opening 1947 product, and that’s when the math just blows your mind. It’s the same thing today, it’s the nostalgia. I always tell people, ‘We sell memories.’ And I don’t think anything hits quite as hard as some of that junk wax with our target audience of these 40- to 55-year-old folks that don’t want to spend $1,200 on the latest Chrome football box. For that $1,200, they can go crazy on a lot of this type of older products. Even ‘junk products,’ I don’t think it’s junk anymore. Not in the form of sealed packs and boxes, anyways.”
TURNER’S TREASURES
In 2010, Turner started collecting unopened product. Now a decade and a half later, he owns thousands of sealed boxes. It’s one of his passions within the hobby.
“I love it and it displays really well,” Turner said. “I basically set up my office at home to look like the card shop I went to when I was a kid. I have all these ’90s boxes stacked up and the whole thing.
“But my theory is it’s a lot like wine. It’s the only analogy I can think of where the supply most certainly goes down over time. Most things are constant supply.
“The population of these sealed boxes cuts in half every few years, because people open the stuff.”
Turner’s wheelhouse for collecting sealed product is 1990s and early 2000s, when he was growing up. It’s a lot of ’90s basketball, baseball and some football. A big LeBron James collector, one of Turner’s major focuses is on 2003 unopened boxes.
“I basically have one of every basketball box from ’69 to ’88, and then I’ve got most baseball boxes in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, if not all, and then a few of the ’50s as well,” Turner said. “I also have a complete Topps pack run from 1951 to 1989.”
Since Turner started buying boxes 16 years ago when prices were lower, he was able to purchase a large chunk of his collection.
“I was looking the other day just for fun, I bought a box of 2003 SP Authentic basketball. I would buy them all day long for like $200 back then and now they’re $2,000,” Turner said. “Some of the stuff was very expensive in 2010. Like a 2003 Exquisite box back then was still 10 to 20 grand, maybe more. Now they’re $80,000 to $100,000.”
According to Turner, the golden era for basketball cards is 1996-99. There was the introduction of 1-of-1 cards and high-scale product being released. Hot product from those years includes 1997 and 1998 Metal Universe (a Kobe Bryant 1997 Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems Green in a PSA 5 sold for $3.15 million in April 2026), 1997-98 Skybox E-X2001, and Flair Showcase from the late 1990s.
Turner guesses that since he purchased most of his basketball product, the values have increased four to five times. In that same time frame, Turner’s baseball sealed wax is up about two to three times.
“I think of ’52 Topps packs, those were 20, 30 grand back then. Now they’re $80,000 to $100,000, maybe even a little higher,” Turner said.
BBCE PAUSE
Hart started authenticating sealed wax in 1985 and his success ballooned into opening BBCE in October 1990. In mid-March this year, he had to do the unthinkable: stop accepting submissions for authentication services because of an insurmountable backlog of items.
“It got really, really ugly,” Hart said.
BBCE made the announcement on March 15 that it would be pausing its service on March 20. In just that five-day window, Hart said 12 pallets of sealed wax came in to be authenticated.
“The turnaround time went from one to three weeks to suddenly earlier this year, four to six months,” said Hart, noting that this is the most popular sealed wax has ever been. “People are telling me, ‘Enjoy your break.’ This is hell right now trying to get through this. There ain’t no break.”
The backlog is estimated to take Hart until late summer or early fall. He is the only person in the company that authenticates boxes.
“People say, ‘Well, why don’t you just hire?’ You can’t go to Taco Bell and get kids to do this,” Hart said. “I’ve got people that have been here with me for 30 years and I’ve tried, and they get it right 90-95% of the time. But that’s not good enough.”
Hart wants to make sure he’s 100% proficient; he has to keep up with criminals that are resealing product and trying to pull a fast one on collectors.
“I’m seeing new ways they’re doing it all the time,” Hart said. “So, if you’re not doing this every day, you’re not up to date on yesterday’s counterfeiter.”
Hart estimates that baseball product accounts for 60-65% of what he authenticates. Football ranges from 15-20%, while basketball and hockey make up the remaining 15-20%. Hart said there isn’t a lot of vintage basketball that comes in since there were no national companies making cards from 1982-86. He added that pre-1977 product for football is scarce.
Pre-1980 product isn’t coming into Hart’s shop very often these days.
“I would say pre-’77, very little,” Hart said. “Then ’78, ’79 and ’80, somewhat. Then ’81 on up, every day.”
Hart always receives some unique boxes to authenticate. In late April, he wrapped a couple of wax boxes of 1971 Topps baseball along with a jumbo box of 1973 Topps football—only the second time he’s ever seen a sealed box from that year.
Hart believes that collecting sealed wax is a trend that isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
“For the past 12 years I’ve said this can’t keep up, and I’ve been wrong every year,” Hart said. “I guess, I should say, yes. I would keep thinking that eventually no, because we know nothing goes up forever.
“Since I started doing this in 1985, basically, if you would have bought anything blue chip—cards, unopened, sets—it’s gone up since you bought it.”
Veres also thinks the popularity of unopened boxes is going to continue because product is gradually dwindling.
“It’s supply and demand, and every day somebody’s ripping something,” Veres said. “Every day, somebody’s finding a box for their forever home where there’s no plans to ever sell it.”
