It was a celebration so raw, so primal, you would have thought they’d met in the backfield and danced over a broken quarterback with a twisted body.
Two former Pac-12 defensive mercenaries-turned-NFL mainstays — one a Canyon del Oro High School kid who’s blossomed into one of the game’s top tacklers, the other a tatted-up version of Thor himself — now joining forces for an ebullient showing of pure bliss, unadulterated excitement as if they’d secured riches and fame. And maybe they had.
But this wasn’t on a football field. Far from it.
This was Blake Martinez, the Dorado-turned-Stanford Cardinal-turned-stud-NFL-linebacker, and Cassius Marsh, a UCLA product entering his eighth NFL season, and this wasn’t Aaron Rodgers they were chasing.
They were trying to take down a Charizard. Value: $18,000.
‘This thing goes up in value’
The first Pokémon cards hit American shelves on January 9, 1999, Martinez’s fifth birthday. The set originated in Japan in 1996, with the English version debuting three years later, and they weren’t exactly a smash hit. Sports card collectors were confused by them. Magic the Gathering players shunned them. Packs of the pocket monsters could be found for pocket change.
For two decades, collectors were the nichest of the niche, those who enjoyed the combination of artwork, gameplay, collectability and, in some cases, value. With new editions released on a semi-yearly basis, there has never been a shortage of decks and packs available, either at hobby and gaming stores, or at retail stars like Target and Walmart.
Until now.
Trading cards are having their moment, thrust into the mainstream by record-breaking sales and influencers — like Marsh and Martinez — aplenty. What was once a game for geeks has become the coolest of collectibles. Target has had to stop selling boxes because of violent altercations.
Gem mint versions of original hard-to-find cards are commanding well into the six figures. Rappers and athletes are using Pokemon cards to flex on their followers.
Diamond grills. Flossy chains. PSA 10 Pikachus. Seems normal.
“People are starting to understand it more, and now they’re in,” said Martinez, who has an NFL-high 548 tackles over the last four seasons for the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants. “This thing goes up in value. That gold necklace you have on, that’s not. That’s my biggest thing in life and business. The things I get and buy, I want them to retain value, to raise in value.”
That’s what brought him back into the hobby that he grew up loving.
And it’s helped him find a side-hustle he never could’ve imagined.
Break, don’t buy
His origin story is like so many others.
Martinez grew up collecting cards — in his case, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! — and loved the games, but other games started taking precedence. By the time he was a budding star at CDO, the childhood distractions fell by the wayside. You can’t focus on Blastoise when you’re trying to blow up running backs. Eventually, his mom threw his cards away.
This wasn’t a tragedy on the level of a tossed 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle or old Honus Wagner tobacco cards, but for Martinez, there is true heartbreak remembering the cards of lore.
“I had a Legend of Blue-Eyes … and a Dark Magician Girl…,” he says, the pain seeping through his voice as he describes his most valuable discarded Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
The rapid ascension of the Pokemon market drew Martinez’s attention last year, and once the Giants season was over — a campaign that included 140 tackles and three sacks in 16 games, by the way — Martinez jumped back in.
He joined a couple of online box breaks — typically a “breaker” will purchase a full box of cards, with anywhere from 24-36 packs, and sell individual packs to defray the cost over a group of consumers — and he hit it big, landing a pair of expensive hologram cards.
Martinez loved the thrill of the chase and the shot of nostalgia straight into his veins.
But he had an epiphany.
Why be a buyer when he could be a breaker?
Martinez went on a limb, bought two sealed, unopened boxes of Pokemon’s early Fossil and Jungle editions and started reaching out to people who might want to join his break.
That’s how he met Marsh.
And it was a match made in heaven.
‘There was no way I could wait any longer’
Like Martinez, Marsh grew up playing trading card games. Unlike Martinez, Marsh focused on Magic the Gathering, which debuted in 1993.
And unlike Martinez, he never really lost his passion.
Marsh has been an avowed MtG player for most of his life, but his somewhat hidden passion found a spotlight in 2016, when his expensive Magic collection was stolen right from his truck. As a second-year Seattle Seahawks defensive end, Marsh’s story went viral, and donations started pouring in. He eventually became the face of Magic the Gathering in the NFL, an anomaly in both worlds.
In the NFL, he’s cerebral and somewhat geeky; among Magic the Gathering players, he literally looks like he could be on a card itself.
For more than a half-decade, he’s been a proud trading card ambassador and a rising figure in the community, but as trading cards have boomed in recent months, he found his passion only growing, and his long-time dream becoming a possibility.
As Marsh hoped and prayed for an NFL roster spot, he kept one wish to himself. He always wanted to open a card store. He had such fond memories of his hometown store in Simi Valley, California — A Hidden Fortress — and he always thought he could pull it off himself.
In the fall of last year, as the NFL was ramping up but little else, Marsh’s business manager and former Oaks Christian High teammate, Nick Nugwynne, discovered a hidden cache of Pokemon cards from his youth that were all in terrific condition. He considered selling the whole lot, but Marsh instead convinced him to get them graded, and the two of them saw the trajectory of the market and decided to use that collection as the corner piece of Marsh’s dream.
And Cash Cards Unlimited was formed.
“I’d been saving up and stacking product, and then Nick and I saw the market start to jump and we fired,” he said. “I didn’t plan to do it until after I was done playing, but there was no way I could wait any longer.”
Marsh — still playing in the NFL in a whirlwind 2020 season that saw him play for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Indianapolis Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers — set Nick off to find a location for the store. After practice, though, Marsh hounded his buddy.
“I was a little bit jealous — he was getting to start up my dream,” Marsh said. “I was living through him, blowing up his phone, trying to get tidbits. I could tell I was irritating him — ‘You gotta stop bugging me.’”
Backed by an NFL ‘backer, Cash Cards Unlimited has been an instant success, and Martinez — who had followed Marsh on social media platforms — reached out. Would Marsh have any customers who might be interested in those unopened boxes of Pokémon Jungle and Fossil?
Marsh was in possession of yet another ultra-rare box of original Pokémon cards — a box of base set Unlimited Edition — and asked Martinez if he wanted to team up to offer not one or two but three of the best Pokemon products on the market.
On April, the pair of NFL studs hopped on the popular WhatNot app and broke packs for customers.
Which leads us to the opening scene.
‘Now we’re besties’
The Cash Cards Unlimited storefront in Westlake Village, California, is a sight to behold, with ultra-rare expensive cards dotting the walls, along with cutting-edge artwork from a local artist and game-worn jerseys of Marsh and several of his NFL teammates. The cases are filled of sports cards — mostly football, obviously — and Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic the Gathering cards, and kids of all ages filter through the store.
But the real fun is happening at the nearby second location.
Sensing a need for a game space for customers who didn’t just want to buy, but wanted to chill, Cash Cards Unlimited acquired a second spot and set up a podcast and video studio as well as a large gaming table space.
It was in that podcast studio that Marsh and Martinez first bonded.
It only took a few packs, but then it was there: The hard-to-find Charizard. More elusive than Tyreek Hill.
“When you win a championship with your team, you become bonded with those guys,” Martinez said. “With this, our first box break, one of the first cards we pulled was a Charizard, an $18,000 card. We went nuts. Literally our first time meeting was the event and now we’re besties.”
They’ll host their third WhatNot break Saturday at noon — just search the app for Blake Martinez, or follow the livestream on CashCardsUnlimited’s YouTube or Twitch channels — and who knows what they’ll pull.
Will it be an old card worth a new car?
Whatever huge card they pull, they’ll celebrate like Aaron Rodgers was on the ground beneath them.
