Auckland Card Show is off to a Solid Start
When Steve Guinee moved to New Zealand in 2023, he quickly learned the area was filled with collectors. Guinee and his wife came from Wales in the United Kingdom, where they attended the London Card Show multiple times. In their new home of Auckland, New Zealand, card shows were non-existent. “I’m a big collector of all kinds of things,” Guinee said. “In the last couple years, I got back into trading cards. When I came down here to New Zealand, I saw that there’s this strong community.” But, Guinee also saw there was nothing like the London Card Show available to collectors. And, so The Auckland Card Show was born.
“The reason why they haven’t had a card show like you’d get in Europe or the U.S., is simply because of where it is in the world,” Guinee said. “It’s much harder for bigger companies to get behind something like this in New Zealand. That was one of the challenges we had to overcome. How do we help these companies get involved down here, and get them in front of attendees and collectors?”
First Show in the Books
The first Auckland Card Show took place on July 27 at the Barfoot & Thompson Stadium in Auckland.
“It was a huge success,” Guinee said. “We’re really proud of how well the show went. We had 1,700 people show up to our first event.”
The eight-hour event consisted of tables for vendors, a Learn to Play area, a trade section, and a tournament room to facilitate trading card games. The show featured 13 sponsors and goodie bags were handed out at the door.
TCG cards are the overwhelming favorites amongst collectors in Oceania.
Guinee was able to pull valuable information from attendees when they ordered tickets online, and he found out 52% were interested in Pokémon products at the show. One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Dragon Ball Z are also extremely popular TCG products in New Zealand.
“For our first show, we were heavily focused on getting the TCG community involved and building that up,” Guinee said. “But for future shows, we’re going to be invested in getting sports card vendors and that market into our shows as well. There’s a huge community down here for collecting sports cards.”
The Auckland Card Show was made an authorized dealer for the show, to accept cards for grading from the third-party grading company CGC. Out of all the sports cards submitted, San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama was the most graded. “The amount of Wemby cards that we had was crazy,” Guinee said.
Bigger & Better in ’25
Guinee is already deep into planning the next Auckland Card Show, slated for mid-2025.
After the successful inaugural show, Guinee acquired a business partner, who has extensive background in the space. Guinee said the partner — whose name will be announced later this year — used to be a big TCG player and now owns a distribution company for TCG products.
“A lot of our values align on what we want to get from the shows,” Guinee said. “We want to build the biggest and best show possible for our attendees.”
The duo is looking at running a multi-day event, combining the card show and a TCG tournament. They have already locked down a large venue for next year.
“We have already locked in several publishers,” said Guinee. “We are looking to host a TCG tournament with up to 1,500 players, which is huge for New Zealand.”
Along with the Auckland Card Show, Guinee would like to launch the Sydney Card Show next year. There was a lot of interest from Australians for the Auckland show. There were a number of attendees, as well as three vendors, that flew from Australia to New Zealand for the big event.
Guinee has been in touch with vendors since July’s Auckland Card Show and they are excited to come back for the next one.
“We’ve barely touched the market down here,” Guinee said. “There’s so many more people, collectors, businesses that we can get involved in the show.”
