This week, Italy's World Baseball Classic espresso machine sold for $16,000. Poncho Pikachus quietly became six-figure grails. 2026 is on pace to become the biggest year for million-dollar card sales in history. And a 66-million-year-old Triceratops skeleton just hit the auction block. Unreal.

This week:

☕ An Italian espresso machine from the WBC dugout just sold for $16K
💰 2026 is on pace to shatter the million-dollar card sales record
🃏 The Pokémon card market's most liquid cards (+ a sleeper hit)
🦕 A $5.5M Triceratops just hit auction at Joopiter
🔥 Heatseekers: Top upcoming releases

Let's get started.

Also, send us feedback and ideas on how to improve by replying to this email!

Sometimes the best collectibles aren't the ones you plan for.

During the 2026 World Baseball Classic, Italy's dugout became famous for a tradition: every time a player hit a home run, he'd come back to the bench and get rewarded with a fresh espresso shot. The machine (a cheap, plastic, one-button office-grade unit) became the unofficial mascot of Italy's run through the tournament, which ended in the semifinals against Venezuela.

Then MLB Auction put it up for sale. Final price? $16,510. For a break-room espresso machine. All proceeds went to the Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center.

The machine itself is probably worth $50. But the story it told was worth five figures 😉

In partnership with FinanceBuzz

Pay no interest until 2027 with some of the best hand-picked credit cards this year. They are perfect for anyone looking to pay down their debt, and not add to it! Click here to see what all of the hype is about.

The pace the hobby is on right now is kind of absurd.

As of mid-March, there have been 12 sales of $1 million or more in 2026. Twelve. In roughly 75 days. The all-time record is 43 million-dollar sales in a single year, set in 2021. At the current pace, 2026 could blow past 50 million-dollar transactions by December.

And it's not just the headline-grabbers. Over 7,000 sales of $10,000+ and 233 six-figure transactions through the first 62 days of the year. If that trajectory holds, we're looking at north of 41,000 five-figure sales and nearly 1,400 six-figure sales by year's end.

We covered the $5.2M Aaron Judge Superfractor and the $3M Ohtani Logoman in previous issues. And a 2025 Topps Chrome Dual MVP Ohtani/Judge Gold MLB Logoman Patch Auto 1/1 just sold for over $2M at auction. The beat goes on.

The high end of this market is not slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating.

Which Pokémon cards actually move? Not the ones that sit in a vault appreciating quietly. The ones that sell fast, sell often, and sell at strong prices every single time.

Mantel just published a ranking of the 20 best-selling Pokémon cards using their "SLAM Score," which measures sales frequency, transaction volume, and price stability rather than raw dollar value. Some highlights:

The full list is a mix of vintage 1st Edition staples, mid-2000s Gold Stars, and modern alt art / SIR chase cards. Pokémon's market isn't just about nostalgia anymore. Modern cards with strong art and genuine scarcity are trading with the same velocity as cards that are 25 years old.

And speaking of cards nobody saw coming: Poncho Pikachus have quietly turned into six-figure grails. The Japan-exclusive Rayquaza and Mega Charizard poncho promo variants went from ~$14.8K and ~$10.6K respectively to over $100K each in roughly two years. That's a 7-10x return on cards that most collectors dismissed as cute novelty promos!

Collectibles aren't just cardboard though. Sometimes they're 66 million years old and weigh several thousand pounds 😅

This is "Trey," a rare complete Triceratops skeleton on Joopiter (Pharrell Williams' auction platform) with an expected price of $4.5 to $5.5 million. Bidding closes March 31. Trey was excavated in 1993 near Lusk, Wyoming and spent 30 years on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center before hitting the market.

This is part of a bigger trend. Last year, Sotheby's sold a Ceratosaurus fossil for $30.5 million. Phillips sold a young Triceratops for $5.4 million in its first-ever dinosaur auction. Fossils are quickly becoming one of the hottest alternative asset classes, and auction houses are racing to meet the demand.

The world of collectibles is wide and deep, and there’s a constant stream of new releases. Here are some of the big ones that are coming up:

In our opinion, this week’s theme was range.

A break-room espresso machine sells for $16K because of the story it tells. An Ohtani jersey goes for $1.5 million. A $5.5M dinosaur skeleton shares auction headlines with million-dollar pieces of cardboard. And Poncho Pikachus that nobody took seriously are six-figure grails.

2026 has already produced 12 million-dollar card sales, and we're not even through Q1.

Whether you're pulling packs, bidding on Triceratops bones, or just watching the zeroes pile up at the end of new sales figures, the collectibles world continues to be one of the most dynamic, unpredictable, and downright fun corners of the investment universe. We love it here.

See you next week!