Michael Rubin is a trading card connoisseur. Here are a few of his favorites, and the one he wishes he had.

There’s nothing like the glory of opening a trading card pack and ending up with a rare one. On Saturday at Wheelhouse Cards in Wayne, the Eagles’ Brandon Graham pulled his own rookie card from a pack — twice.

Graham and Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin were at the store celebrating Hobby Rip Night, a trading card event sponsored by Topps and Fanatics at more than 500 stores worldwide. Dozens of children and adults packed the store to trade cards with one another and with Graham and Rubin, some fully stocked with a briefcase or binder and others buying their first packs that day.

Card trading has boomed post-pandemic, Wheelhouse Cards owner Jon Spadaford said. He opened his shop along Lancaster Avenue in February 2021 as a passion project since the closest card store was almost an hour away. In the years since, the business has exploded, and Spadaford is opening his third Wheelhouse Cards location later this year.

Fanatics acquired Topps in 2022, cementing Rubin and Fanatics’ place as one of the major trading card sellers. Since the purchase, Rubin said Fanatics has been looking to improve the marketing around the business to bring more people into the hobby.

“I love sports and entrepreneurialism,” Rubin told The Inquirer. “This brings the two together. I love seeing the passions here. These kids are all giant sports fans, but they’re also little entrepreneurs working me, and I like that.”

Like many, Rubin started collecting as a kid but fell out of the hobby in adulthood.

“I used to go to ski camp. It was the only sport I was actually good at, and I remember I used to go up the chairlifts, and we would trade cards the whole way up and down the chairlifts,” Rubin said. “No helmets, no safety bar. This was like 40 years ago, but I would trade cards like crazy on the chairlifts.”

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But now, he’s back to collecting, and brought an entire briefcase full of cards to the store, his second of five stops that day for the event. At Hobby Rip Night, a Wheelhouse Cards employee needed to approve each trade before swapping to ensure none of the children got ripped off by someone who knew better.

Those same rules did not apply to Graham and Rubin, who admitted to getting worked by a kid.

“Right now, I’ve been collecting my friends,” Rubin said. “I’ve got a ton of [Tom] Brady cards, a ton of [Joel] Embiid cards, a ton of C.J. [Stroud] cards, Victor Wembanyama cards. That’s fun for me, because you kind of feel like you are growing with these guys, to have their cards and be able to collect them. Someone just said to me they wanted to trade Tatum for Embiid. It was easy for me to trade Jayson Tatum, even though he’s my guy — Joel is my brother. Philly trade, get a Joel Embiid card for a Tatum, even though I got taken advantage of.”

Rubin doesn’t pull many trading card packs these days — when he wants a card, he gets it. What could a guy who has everything possibly still be searching for? But even Rubin has a white whale.

“I think it would be inappropriate for me to buy it, but the card I really want is the Olympic card that’s signed by [Kevin Durant], Steph [Curry], and LeBron [James],” Rubin said. “We made one in the world, and I think someone made a bid for $125,000. Now, Giannis [Antetokounmpo] just offered a million bucks for it. I’d actually like to outbid him and buy it, but I think it would be a little bit inappropriate for us to buy our own cards.”

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