SDCC, Fanatics Fest, and The National: The Whole Hobby Went on Tour This Summer

 Six weeks. Three cities. One extremely tired hobby. San Diego Comic-Con, Fanatics Fest in New York, and The National in Chicago all landed inside the same summer window this year, which meant that if you wanted to experience all of it in person you basically needed a second job just funding the flights. I didn't have one of those this year, I was out of work for a chunk of this summer, so none of these were happening for me in person no matter how badly I wanted to be standing in one of those lines myself. That put me in the same spot as a lot of you, watching this from home through recaps, dealer posts, and whatever collectors were venting about in real time. So this is that: everything I pieced together from people who were actually there, the stuff that went right, and the stuff that clearly did not.

Watching from the sidelines

There's a specific kind of frustration in sitting out the biggest weekend of the collecting year and reading play by play instead of pulling anything yourself. No line to stand in, sure, but also no shot at anything exclusive, and this year in particular there was a lot of "you had to be there and even then you might not have gotten it" energy coming out of all three shows. If you were also sitting this one out for money reasons, or any reason, you weren't missing a clean, easy weekend. By most accounts these were three of the more chaotic editions in recent memory.

So let's go city by city.

San Diego Comic-Con: the card side of a movie convention

SDCC isn't a card show and never has been, it's a pop culture convention that happens to have a very healthy card corner tucked inside it, and that corner keeps getting bigger every year. Topps had a real presence at Booth #2913/#2934 with the first look at 2026 Topps Mint Marvel, the follow-up to last year's set, and it's a tiered thing this time around. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, with the Platinum tier expanded to 125 total cards and numbered to 99 or less. There were three SDCC-exclusive original art cards from Ian McDonald featuring Spider-Man, Hulk, and Punisher, plus the Black & Yellow Electric Dots parallel that's only pullable from convention boxes.

Star Wars showed up too, though in a different lane. Star Wars Unlimited, the trading card game, had its own SDCC-exclusive greyscale set running $100 a pop, which is the kind of thing that either sounds completely reasonable or completely unhinged depending on how deep you are in this hobby already. 

DC leaned into their comics side more than cards this year, PSA partnered with them on an Absolute Batman #22 exclusive with connecting variant covers, and PSA also ran walk-in grading all weekend, which is genuinely one of the more useful things a company can do at a con like this. Upper Deck also debuted its first Absolute Universe DC trading cards at Booth #307, a 15-card set built entirely around Absolute Batman, Absolute Superman, and Absolute Wonder Woman cover art, sold in promo packs for $25 alongside a $100 Shoe Palace bundle with an exclusive t-shirt and foil comic.

The lowlight, and it's big: SDCC ran hot this year in a way that a lot of longtime attendees said felt different from normal con chaos. The wristband and line placeholder system for Hall H reportedly broke down, with more than 600 people who'd been waiting up to 30 hours turned away and told there was no chance they'd get in, after line cutting and questionable wristbands got through security. At the Sunday talkback panel, people lined up at the mic to demand answers and organizers mostly just absorbed it. On the exclusives side, the story was similar: limited booth exclusives sold out fast and started showing up on eBay within hours at three to five times retail, which is exactly the outcome you'd expect when demand this large runs into a show that hasn't really grown to match it. And on top of all that, if you weren't in San Diego you weren't part of any of it in real time either, Hall H panels weren't livestreamed this year, full stop. Being home reading about this instead of standing in it firsthand still stung, but reading the recaps, I'm not sure standing in it would have felt much better.

The highlight: the actual booth presence for cards felt more intentional than it has in past years. This wasn't an afterthought stuffed in a corner, Topps clearly built product specifically for this crowd, and the DC and PSA collaborations gave people a reason to show up at the booth even outside the panel scramble.

Fanatics Fest: bigger, louder, and still figuring some things out

Fanatics Fest hit the Javits Center July 16 through 19 and pulled in more than 200,000 people, another attendance record in only its third year running. Tom Brady, Jay-Z, Travis Scott, John Cena, the Knicks bringing the Larry O'Brien trophy in for a mini championship parade inside the venue, it was a full spectacle and it leaned hard into the fact that this is a sports and culture event first, card show second.

That said, card news wasn't absent. VeeFriends came back for another year with 2026 Topps Chrome VeeFriends and one of their TCG championship qualifiers running during the weekend. Topps had Fanatics Fest exclusive boxes of Series 2 Baseball with Big Apple foil variations, and the Cactus Jack collaboration with Travis Scott dropped $600 boxes that sold through fast. If you're mainly here for Marvel, Star Wars, or DC specifically, Fanatics Fest is going to feel thinner than SDCC or The National, it's just not built around those properties the way the other two shows are.

The lowlight, and it's a real one: crowd flow. Multiple people covering the show on the ground described barricaded sections bleeding into each other, lines overlapping so badly you couldn't tell which queue belonged to which experience, and just generally struggling to move across the floor. That's not a small complaint at 200,000 attendees, that's a structural problem Fanatics needs to solve before next year. Ticket price has also been a recurring gripe for two years running now, with some fans saying $70 for entry plus limited actual athlete access doesn't add up the way it should.

The highlight: the sheer scale of what they're pulling off logistically is still impressive, four days, hundreds of athletes, a trophy gallery with the actual FIFA World Cup Trophy sitting in the room. Say what you want about the execution, nobody else is attempting an event at this size.

The National: Chicago does what Chicago does

The National ran July 29 through August 2 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, its 46th year and 16th time hosted in the Chicago area, and by every account this was one of the biggest editions yet. Lines stretched out the door before opening on day one, VIP holders waited an extra hour just to get in, and the floor stayed packed for all five days. Over 600 dealer tables, a $3 million Mickey Mantle collection on display from Memory Lane, and people were both buying and selling in serious volume. This is still the closest thing the hobby has to its own Super Bowl.

Card news wise, this show skews heavier sports than non-sports, but Pokémon's footprint keeps growing here every single year, and that's worth watching if you're a non-sports collector wondering whether The National is worth the trip. It's slowly becoming less of a purely sports show than it used to be.

The one non-sports highlight worth its own paragraph: Toytastic's Star Wars Trade Night. This ran Saturday, August 1, right after The National wrapped for the day, over at a separate Chicago venue, and it's become the actual gathering point for Star Wars card collectors specifically, more than 300 collectors, dealers, and fans, an Artist Alley stacked with 25-plus creators including a lot of the official Topps Star Wars artists, sketch commissions, signings, and trading all in one room. Founder Josh Deutsch called it the place to be Saturday night after the convention floor closes, and honestly that tracks, The National itself skews sports so heavily that a dedicated Star Wars-only night is the one place all weekend where non-sports collectors got a show built entirely around them instead of squeezed in around everything else. 

This year Showmethemoneyy and Vent_Collects ripped an entire case of Star Wars stellar in an epic break that included a 1/1 Saw Gerrera and a 1/1 dual auto of Obi and Anakin

If you're a Star Wars collector deciding whether The National weekend is worth the trip next year, Trade Night might genuinely be the bigger draw than the show itself.

The lowlight, and honestly it's the story of the summer: PSA. On-site submissions were up 160 percent over last year and PSA had to suspend Express submissions entirely partway through the show. Collectors who paid up to $699 for same-day grading didn't get their cards back before the show ended and had to have them mailed instead. PSA apologized and offered discounted post-show grading, but this comes on top of a Value-tier grading pause earlier in the year and fraud allegations that have already put the company under a microscope in 2026. If you were planning to lean on-site grading as your reason to go next year, that's worth factoring in.

The highlight: the hobby is healthy, full stop. Dealers were describing the energy as some of the best they've seen in years, and the crowd wasn't just flippers, it was families and kids and people who came in with boxes to sell and left with new grails.

So will people go back next year?

Reading between the lines of what collectors and dealers are actually saying, yes, but with conditions attached. SDCC's card presence keeps earning its spot and nobody's questioning whether Topps belongs there anymore. Fanatics Fest needs to fix crowd flow before its scale becomes a liability instead of a selling point, and the ticket price conversation isn't going away on its own. The National remains the one nobody skips, but PSA's meltdown gave a lot of people a reason to rethink whether on-site grading is worth the wait next time, or whether it's better to just mail it in and enjoy the show.

None of these events are going anywhere. The bigger question the hobby seems to be asking itself right now isn't whether to show up, it's how to actually plan around three massive shows landing inside a six week window without burning out completely before August even ends.

Related: where card grading actually stands · Topps taking the Marvel license