What "best" means on these pages
Each state page below ranks up to twenty independent card shops by a Bayesian average of their Google rating. The formula pulls a shop's rating toward the site-wide mean in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it, so a 5.0 from nine reviews does not outrank a 4.8 from two thousand, and a genuinely high rating with real volume behind it cannot be displaced by a small sample. Across the directory 4,965 of 6,844 listings carry a rating and review count, which is the input this uses; the remaining 1,879 have no score. In states with fewer rated independents than the list has room for, unrated shops fill the remaining places, listed after all the rated ones.
Two groups are excluded outright rather than scored. National chains — 2,345 listings, GameStop and similar — are removed, because a page meant to surface local shops should not hand a slot to a mall retailer. So are venues that are not card shops as such: pawn shops, antique malls, flea markets, thrift stores and card vending machines. Those stay in the directory, because some of them genuinely have a card case, but they are never promoted as a best shop.
What this is not is a review. Nobody from Card Shop Hub has visited these shops. It is an ordering of public Google ratings, and it inherits everything wrong with those: a shop that opened last year is scored on thin data, and a rating can lag a change of ownership or staff by a long way. Read it as a shortlist to call, not a verdict.
Pick a state to see its ranking. The number beside each name is that state's total listing count, chains included; the ranked page itself shows independents only. For every shop rather than the top twenty, use the state index.