Welcome to zAMnite Cards

I grew up on Absecon Island, in Atlantic City when Zeppelin soared. Yankees fan, street kid, beach bum, car obsessed. The Shore was a car and motorcycle culture, property rentals full of vacation money, boardwalk carnies running games of skill and chance, casinos doing the same at scale, out-of-towners rolling in all summer with their wallets. I was on a bike or a skateboard watching all of it. On the beach or in the surf otherwise. You learned early who held the edge, who set the terms, who stayed ahead.

The Yankees weren’t handed to you in a Philly TV market. You found WPIX on the UHF dial, before cable, or you listened on the radio. Either way, you found it. Pinstripe lore came through rain delay cinema by watching vintage baseball films when the weather stopped play. I was the only Yankees fan in my local crew. The AC Press told you who was rising before the other kid figured out cards he was sitting on. Munson dropped from the sky in 1979 and a card in a shoe box became a different thing entirely. Andretti was in those same pages, right next to the MLB standings, a Formula 1 story that made sense to a kid with Italian roots and Hot Wheels. Soon, Ferrari became world champions again, after decades of drought.

Nobody called bubble gum cards a hobby. It was just baseball cards. What kids bought at any corner store or Ben Franklin 5-10 we called “The Dime Store”, what kids played with, what kids used to compete and make deals. We played a few types of baseball card games. That was how we traded. Nobody swapped straight up, not even best friends. If someone asked to trade, the answer was no, but we can flip if you want. Both kids agreed on exactly which cards were at stake before any game began. That agreement was the trade. The game just settled it.

One game was physical, called ‘flipping’, and had variations. Tossing cards was called ‘Pitch’, trying to keep it from flipping through the air as it headed towards a wall, flying flat and controlled, “farsies” for distance, “leaners” against a wall took ’em all. The ‘Heads or Tails’ game was single cards dropped as we stood facing each other, a designated player called which side would land up. Corners destroyed. Nobody cared.

Then, there was the blind-draw matching game we called ‘shuffle.’ The objective was to win the entire combined pile of cards by collecting matching pairs, and crucially, by making the final match and taking every unpaired card still remaining. Before we started, we set the match: same team, color, position, player, or whatever connection we agreed counted that day.

Both kids contributed an equal number of cards to one deck. The deck shuffled face down, turned over to reveal the top card, giving the non-shuffler the start. That card moved to the bottom, still face up. If the opponent was lucky, that first reveal guaranteed a match to get them started. Non-shuffler went first. You held the face-up stack in one hand, riffled through the deck’s edge with the other, guesstimating and pulling your blind choice to the top at just the right moment. Match the two to keep the pair. No match, the opponent goes. The last match takes everything remaining.

I played the local Phillies and Mets kids in spring and fall. In summer, the tourists, who we called “shoebies”, arrived as day trippers, weekenders, and summer renters with cards from other markets throughout the Northeast. We scoped out kids with baseball caps or wearing their team’s logo. We marked the swanky rentals downbeach with out of state auto registrations with a team bumper sticker or license plate frame. We looked up boxscores for the hot teams and players to covet. The cards that didn’t make the cut got clothespinned to the bike forks. The cards were social currency and the entry point to the schoolyard, the boardwalk scene, the summer stranger.

DC Comics and Wacky Packages lived alongside the baseball cards. Football cards were the novelty. Schoolyard basketball, beach football, street hockey, skateboarding, and surfing were the rhythm. Cards rode rubber-banded in a back pocket through all of it, until mom found the weed stashed with the collection. It all went. Upper Deck pulled me back years later. The hologram and photography made it feel real. Then the industry went nuts.

Topps Formula 1 cards lit the fire again because that thread was always there. But I returned with a different perspective: less interested in the grading chase, more discerning about endless variations, and more aware of how distribution can shape the market. My appreciation for Pokémon came from watching a bulk blind-pull game on a livestream. It took me back to the flipping games we played as kids. Then Pokémon’s artwork pulled me in, and the TCG-collecting culture gave the hobby a whole new dimension.