Corey Lewis has been in the print, packaging, trading cards and design industry for 15 years. He is most at home when he can hear the rhythmic hum of presses. You can find him chatting with design teams on the details of effective packaging design hierarchy, working with a retoucher to bring brands to life or in the prepress department talking with seasoned veterans about color.

How did your career develop in the trading card industry, and what is your role now?

I’ve been a design and print dork for my entire career. Like many of our colleagues, I got my start in printing by working with family – my dad worked at a printing company in downtown Chicago, and my first job was working with him in the shop part-time over summer breaks from college. The energy there was electric, and I knew I wanted to learn every part of the business, which I gradually did by holding various jobs around the plant.

I’ve since moved on to working at big brands – most recently, in trading cards and collectibles. I’ve worked for or freelanced with four large TCG brands – Pokèmon, MYA, Ward and Depths. I now have my own consulting business, Card Juice, where I help brands design and print games. For me, games, collectibles and cards are an industry where printing can truly shine, and people with deep print experience are valued. Are you wanting to make a game? The production had better be high-quality and durable to ensure it can be played over and over again. Are you interested in publishing a set of collectible cards? You’d better offer an arsenal of print embellishments that not only make the final product shine but also accentuate the artwork.

How have you seen the trading card industry change and grow in the last five to 10 years? What has prompted this continued growth?

This is a fascinating question that has multiple answers. Particularly during COVID-19, interest in cards and collectibles exploded. I think people responded to the pandemic in different ways, but many people got into new hobbies to fill the void of going out or seeing friends. We saw it with baking bread, the rise of pet adoptions and, certainly, with collecting things like cards. Many of the founders I talk with and the companies where I’ve worked experienced tremendous growth in their sales during COVID. And not just a small rise either – but exponential growth, two times, three times or even four times annually.

Trading and collecting cards are multifaceted. If the cards have an underlying game mechanic, many people like to play that game. Some collect their favorite brands – like Magic, Pokèmon or Upper Deck – for nostalgia.

One interesting segment that is driving explosive growth in collectible cards is the secondary market. In historical times of uncertainty, when institutions could no longer be relied on, investors put stock in physical items – gold, silver, stamps, sneakers, Beanie Babies or even tulip bulbs. I think we’re seeing that today with cards. Many people view trading cards as an investment. The secondary market and associated platforms, like WhatNot, eBay and Offer Up, definitely drive that chase where collectors are looking for the next big pull.

With your background in the gaming industry for trading cards, what marketing challenges are there for this segment of the trading card industry moving forward?

I mostly work with mid-size or even small trading card startup brands. Many founders dream of being the next big card brand, the next big Pokémon. But they often forget that it’s a brand with a tremendous amount of equity that’s been built up over the last 30 years. Whether it’s animation, video games, beloved characters that everyone recognizes, licensed goods, apparel, books or more, that level of trend is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to emulate overnight.

My advice to the founders and brands I work with is this: Find your community, support that community and do right by it. Always. This especially is true if there’s an underlying game mechanic to the cards, because nobody is going to want to buy a card game that people don’t play. Be transparent with your fans. Sponsor local tournaments at the neighborhood card shop. Give away unique promo cards as prizes. Be content with being grassroots for a while and build up your community. Just concentrate on making fun, high-quality cards that people value and want to collect. Don’t just chase success.

What trends are emerging in design and production, including specialty effects and embellishments, that will influence the future of the trading card industry?

With trading cards specifically, the value proposition to the consumer is to drop $4.99 on a pack of cardboard (simplifying here). So it better be some high-quality, shiny cardboard to make it worth the cost! Certainly, continued innovation in foils – both patterns, application and colors – is something top of mind. Unbelievably, many of the top TCG brands use the same stock patterns as each other. I keep seeing the same ‘Pillars of Light,’ ‘Galaxy’ and ‘Rainbow’ patterns across the same brands.

In line with that, since so many of the ‘parts’ that make up a trading card are common (same foil, same paper, same coatings, same inks) and the barrier to entry with digital printing is getting lower and lower, counterfeit cards are becoming more and more high-quality every year. There is a lot of room for innovation in authenticating technology for cards. One startup I worked with, MYA, prints a 16-digit unique blockchain code on each card as an authentication mechanism. As the value of cards continues to skyrocket, I think this will be necessary for more brands to address.

How has sustainability played a role with the trading card market? Do you foresee this continuing to be on the forefront of consumers and brands moving forward?

Many legacy brands continue to print with conventional inks – especially for card backs – in order to hit color targets that were established decades ago, which I find to be insane. The benefits of UV-curable printing – including lower VOCs and more efficient energy usage, among other things – make a compelling case that something like trading cards should be UV printed. The modern fan is environmentally savvy – if this data were widely known, fans would accept an increase in Delta E to the established target as a tradeoff for being more sustainable. I’d like to highlight RadTech as an organization that promotes the adoption of UV-curable printing in our industry and quantifies the sustainability benefits of doing so. They do great work.

Unfortunately, I believe the industry has a long way to go in addressing sustainability in a more public and transparent way. You typically don’t see many game or card brands make this a front-and-center issue, and normally, you have to go digging through a corporate website to find any information at all.

What do you predict for the future of trading cards, in general, and the gaming card market, in particular? Do you believe AI will have an influence on the trading card market and production in the future? 

I hope that AI has zero influence on the trading card market. The most successful collectible brands are successful because of the beautiful artwork that talented human artists contribute. They are what make these cards valuable and worth collecting in the first place. The same is true in the sports market, with stunning photography captured of our favorite athletes competing at the highest level. Several unscrupulous startups that have gone to market quickly with AI-generated trading card artwork have been rejected by fans and roundly denounced on platforms like Reddit.

Overall, I believe the future of collectibles and trading cards is extremely bright. It’s an industry that’s growing at a fantastic pace, and so many people resonate with beautifully executed cards and collectibles that are created with the highest quality possible. For the majority of your readers – printers, equipment manufacturers, design professionals and others in the printing supply chain – I think knowledge of this market absolutely will be essential in the future. There is a tremendous shortage of expertise and capabilities to produce cards in North America, such that there are really only five big printers in the market, and large brands actively are searching for additional manufacturing and printing capacity. The manufacturers that are familiar with this market undoubtedly can reap the benefits for years to
come.