Sacramento doesn’t have a pro
football team, but you wouldn’t know it by the thousands of
enthusiastic fans who showed up to see NFL legend Tom Brady
outside the Golden 1 Center Thursday afternoon. The seven-time
Super Bowl champion was there to promote his collecting and
trading card shop,
CardVault by Tom
Brady, which is
located in Downtown Commons.

The mid-afternoon rally drew fans
wearing Tom Brady jerseys from his two NFL teams, the New England
Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Two men wore plastic goat
heads to honor Brady, who’s been dubbed the “greatest of all
time” quarterback. Children sat on their father’s shoulders to
get a glimpse of the superstar, who threw autographed footballs
to the crowd.

A fan bearing both of the teams Tom Brady played with — the New
England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers — waits outside Brady’s
CardVault store at Downtown Commons on Feb. 5.

“This is the best turnout we’ve
had yet,” Brady told the crowd. “And it doesn’t surprise me, back
home in the state where I grew up, 90 minutes from San Mateo, to
see you guys coming out and showing up. I love you guys so much.
When (co-founder) Chris and I talked about where we wanted to
start in California, I said it’s got to be Sacramento.”

Nicole Curran of West Sacramento
brought her 12-year-old son Cruz, who told Comstock’s that he
used $300 in Christmas gift cards to buy cards at the CardVault,
including one of his favorite players, Philadelphia Eagles
quarterback Jalen Hurts.

“The Vault is such a great
opportunity for Sacramento. It gives kids and young adults and
even adults like me to be able to come and have the opportunity
to appreciate cards; to appreciate the value of cards. It’s a
great learning opportunity for kids to learn how to trade cards.
It’s not just Pokémon. It has everything to do with sports
memorabilia,” Curran said.

Sacramento is the first
California location for CardVault, which has 12 stores so far
across the U.S. Co-founder Chris Costa tells Comstock’s that
today’s trading cards are very different from the stack of cards
that used to come with a stick of gum 50 years ago.

With Tom Brady inside, crowds wait to get into the CardVault
store Feb. 5.

“They’re getting players to start
signing cards that get put into packs, and they’re also taking
pieces of players’ jerseys and putting them into cards. They’re
creating a rarity that had never existed in the generations
prior,” Costa said.

The popularity of cards has
exploded in recent years, with thousands of new cards bought each
day and trading cards for as much as $1 million. The values can
increase with age. A 2008 card autographed by Kobe Bryant and
Michael Jordan sold for nearly
$13 million in
2025.

Costa says cards are also part of
the collecting trend. Some people may collect expensive watches,
purses or wine, but as the popularity of athletes rises, the
trading card industry has taken off as well.

“It’s also the growth of sports
as part of our culture, right?” he said. “So with the advent of
the invention of social media and the position that athletes now
have in our society compared to what they had in our society, 10,
15, 30, 50, 100 — how far back you want to go — they are more
iconic than they’ve ever been.”

While in the past, trading cards
have only been about athletes, they now come in a broad range of
categories, from Pokémon to Disney characters to Marvel
superheroes and K-pop stars. This has led to the trading world
diversifying and attracting more people of all ages, including
women.

Tom Brady signs a fan’s football as he walks to the CardVault
store at Downtown Commons Feb. 5.

Costa and mothers like Curran
also like that collecting cards teaches children about financial
skills. They’ll buy a card and follow along as its value goes up.
They’ll invest in others and learn how to buy and trade, similar
to trading stocks.

“One of the coolest parts of our
space is you can have a kid coming to one of our shops, can spend
20 bucks, and he can leave with the biggest smile he’s had in
years. But you can also have somebody come in and pull out a
briefcase and put five cards on the table that they’ve been
holding for 10 years that are worth a million dollars and
everything in between. And I think that’s what makes our industry
so unique and so special,” Costa said.

As for Brady, Costa says he was
able to get his endorsement for the business because Tom has
always been an avid collector and sees the potential of where the
industry is going. Costa and his co-founders started CardVault in
2020, but it became CardVault by Tom Brady in 2025, when the
football star acquired a 50 percent ownership stake in the
business.

“Today’s turnout was just the
craziest turnout we’ve ever had for an event in our company’s
history,” Costa said. “It was shocking. We were all blown away.
We’re so grateful to run in Sacramento, and it’s such an amazing
community, and we already knew that, but today definitely
cemented that in all of our minds.”

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