Fanatics Collectibles is officially entering the card repack market with the launch of its new “Instant Rips” product Tuesday.
The product will debut with the “Odyssey” series, which contains 1,000 baseball card repacks for $250. Each repack contains one graded card.
According to Fanatics, cards in the Odyssey repack will have a value floor of about $90 and a ceiling of about $3,800. A checklist is expected to be published Tuesday.
Instant Rips will launch as a series of giveaways Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET with The Hobby House on Fanatics Live. Giveaways will continue Wednesday prior to the launch of the paid product Thursday at 6:45 p.m. ET.
A collaboration between Fanatics Collect and Fanatics Live, Instant Rips will feature breakers on the live-streaming platform opening digital twins of cards stored in the Fanatics Collect vault. Ownership of the cards will instantly be transferred to the customer, who can then decide to keep the card or list it for sale on the Fanatics Collect marketplace.
Current market valuations for each card will be provided by an integration with third-party data tool Card Ladder.
According to Fanatics Collect and Fanatics Live CEO Nick Bell, the company began building Instant Rips in earnest toward the end of 2024 and has been testing the project internally for the last six to eight weeks.
“Our vision from Day 1 has been to create the most entertaining experience for ripping cards,” Bell told cllct. “I think with this format, it allows us to do some really fun things in the future around gamifying the experience.”
Fanatics joins a highly competitive marketplace that is currently saturated with thousands of competitors, though only a limited number of repacks are available through trusted brands or businesses.
Repack products, which have emerged in recent years as a popular alternative to the rising costs of sealed products from trading card manufacturers, often feature a single card or series of cards curated by the seller.
Despite the extreme popularity among a large portion of the collecting community, many repacks have been criticized for the low quality of included cards and overall lack of transparency.
“There are folks out there that do repacks really, really well, and then there are some folks that their repack products are not as strong,” Bell said. “We just wanted to bring some level of consistency and professionalism to repacks and have a consistent experience across it.”
For Fanatics, the addition of a repack product expands the company’s growing portfolio of offerings across the trading card and memorabilia space.
Customers can currently buy into sports and trading card breaks through Fanatics Live, purchase individual cards or sealed products through Topps directly or the Fanatics Collect marketplace.
The Fanatics Authentic brand also offers game-used and autographed memorabilia.
According to Bell, a major driver for Fanatics creating its own repack product was to support many of its breakers who don’t have the required infrastructure to create their own. Quality repack products require both significant financial investment as well as the logistical infrastructure to handle the sourcing of the cards before pack creation and post-purchase shipping.
Fanatics Collect will handle all storage and shipping for Instant Rips, eliminating many of the most difficult hurdles for smaller breakers. Those breakers, Bell says, can instead focus on being entertainers.
“We were hearing from a lot of our breakers on [Fanatics Live] that were like, ‘Hey, we see a lot of bigger breakers doing repacks. How should we think about it? How can we get into it?’ Bell said. “So, I think this just really helps a lot of those folks, and it creates a consistent product and a product that we can stand behind.”
According to Bell, the inventory for Instant Rips packs is sourced from a variety of places, including in-person at card shows and directly from grading leader PSA. The company’s acquisition of distressed marketplace PWCC in 2023 provided some of the necessary infrastructure, including the vaulting facility and the buying team.
“We’re at trade shows. We’re talking to collectors with cards that are in the vault. We are acquiring some cards from PSA,” Bell said. “We’re sourcing this in a very traditional way. We’ve had a team out there buying cards for a few months.”
Fanatics’ expansion into the repack space won’t come without skepticism.
To some collectors, opening repacks or sealed wax and buying into breaks is too bad of a value proposition — even when any entertainment value is factored in.
The lack of transparency for repacks especially — many don’t include checklists of any kind and simply advertise grails and chases that will never be hit — has soured the concept for many.
Bell knows some of those collectors can’t be won over, but he believes Fanatics can do repacks better than what many competitors have produced so far.
Fanatics is expected to quickly upgrade its checklist from a static list to a dynamic document following early feedback on the program.
There are also plans to expand into additional sports and eventually offer a variety of different formats and repack configurations. Currently available as a limited drop, Fanatics plans to eventually make Instant Rips available indefinitely.
"We want to provide something for all collectors,” Bell said. “We recognize that there are many different types of collectors and repacks are a popular product and something that we think we can improve upon and create a better experience.”
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct.