Birches Health featured in Barron's on gambling's rise in trading cards
Birches Health was featured in a new Barron's article, "Gambling Sweeps Across Another Industry. Welcome to the Future of Trading Cards," written by Nick Devor. The piece explores how "digital repacks," which let buyers pay for a chance at a valuable trading card, have exploded in popularity across the collectibles industry, and how that growth is drawing new scrutiny from gambling researchers, regulators and mental health experts.
The article traces the trend through companies like Derek Jeter-backed Arena Club, GameStop and crypto-based platforms like Collector Crypt, which reports having sold $1 billion worth of digital repacks since December 2024.
Barron's found 52 sites now offering the format, where customers pay anywhere from $25 to $5,000 for a virtual pack that reveals a real card of uncertain value, often with the option to sell it back for cash on the spot. The reporting includes voices on both sides of the debate: gambling policy researcher Leon Y. Xiao argues that some of these sites amount to unlicensed gambling, while industry executives like Fanatics Collectibles co-founder Josh Luber and Collector Crypt CEO Tuomas Holmberg describe the format as "gamified shopping" rather than betting. The piece also raises concerns about age verification, noting that several repack sites don't require it, and highlights commentary from Brett Abarbanel of the University of Nevada's International Gaming Institute about the risk of normalizing gambling-like behavior for kids.
As part of its reporting, Barron's cited data from Birches Health, the leading virtual treatment provider for gambling addiction, on how this trend is already showing up in patient care. The article notes that Birches Health has logged a 207% increase in patients discussing "trading cards," "digital repacks," and related terms over the past 12 months, a figure that underscores how quickly a hobby-adjacent product has started to intersect with clinical gambling treatment. Birches Health's inclusion reflects the company's position at the front lines of tracking how emerging forms of digital wagering and adjacent products can significantly impact real individuals, well before those trends show up in formal regulation or public debate.
The rest of the article paints a vivid picture of how normalized this behavior has become at industry events. At the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago, the largest sports card show in the country, the reporter describes children lining up at Arena Club and Fanatics kiosks to open virtual packs, with a company host asking one child, "Are you feeling lucky?"
The piece also details how digital repack operators use tactics familiar from gambling and slot machines, including flashing lights, jackpot-style celebrations for big wins, and Discord communities that openly frame the experience in gambling terms. Meanwhile, some companies maintain no-purchase sweepstakes alternatives designed to keep the format outside the legal definition of gambling, though Barron's found those free-entry options are often difficult to locate on the sites themselves.
Birches Health's data point in this story adds a clinical, real-world dimension to a conversation that is just beginning among industry executives, researchers and regulators. As digital repacks and other gambling-like products continue to reshape how younger generations interact with collecting, gaming, and betting, Birches Health remains focused on identifying these emerging patterns early and ensuring people struggling with them have access to specialized, evidence-based treatment.
Read the full article on Barron's here.
