The U.S. Cities With the Most Card Shops

Top 25 Cities by Independent Card Shops

Ranked by the number of independently owned card shops in the Card Shop Hub directory. National chain locations are excluded — see the methodology below. Every city links to its full listing.

Top 10 States by Independent Card Shops

The same count rolled up to the state level, alongside how many distinct cities in each state have at least one independent shop.

How We Counted

These rankings come straight from the Card Shop Hub directory and are recomputed every time the site is rebuilt, so they track the data rather than a snapshot taken once.

• Independents only. 2,225 national chain locations (GameStop, Game X Change, Vintage Stock, EntertainMART, and big-box retailers) are excluded. Counting them would measure mall density rather than local hobby presence.
• One row per storefront. Each physical location counts once; a shop with two locations in the same city counts twice.
• Ties are broken by total customer review volume, then alphabetically, so the order is stable between builds.
• Coverage. 7,388 independent shops across 3,362 cities and 51 states.

Chain share: where the listings are least local

A ranking of raw shop counts flatters big states, because a big state has more malls. Chain share — the proportion of a state's listings that belong to a national retail brand — measures something different, and it moves a long way from state to state. Nationally 2,225 of the 9,613 listings in this directory are chain locations, or 23%.

Among states with at least twenty listings, the most chain-heavy are Texas (38%), Georgia (32%), North Carolina (32%), Louisiana (31%), and South Carolina (31%). The least are Maine (7%), Alaska (8%), South Dakota (9%), Wyoming (9%), and Vermont (10%). A collector in the second group has a materially different local scene from one in the first, even where the headline shop count is similar.

The cause is not mysterious. Every GameStop-style location in this dataset is classified as a trading card game seller, so a state whose card retail runs through mall chains posts a high TCG count and a low independent one. The rankings on this page exclude chains outright for that reason, and every state and city page on the site groups them separately rather than mixing them into the list.

How concentrated the hobby actually is

The top of the table above is not where most of the country lives. The ten highest-ranked cities hold 349 independent shops between them, out of 7,388 nationally — around 5% of the total in ten places. Las Vegas alone accounts for 76.

At the other end, 1,965 of the 3,362 cities that have an independent shop have exactly one, and the directory covers 3,791 cities in total once chain-only places are counted. That long tail is why the practical unit of this site is a city page rather than a national ranking, and why every city page ends with the nearest other cities that have shops, measured by straight-line distance from the listings' own coordinates.

Read the ranking above as a map of where the hobby is dense, not as a list of where the good shops are. A city with two well-run stores beats a city with nine indifferent ones, and nothing in a count can tell those apart — for that, the best shops pages rank on rating weighted by review volume, and the guide to finding a good card shop covers what to check once you are there.

Frequently Asked Questions