Card collectors in Tampa have a new date circled on the calendar: Charlie's TCG Con lands at the Egypt Shrine Center on Saturday, September 12, running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with more than 60 vendors slated to sell everything from Pokémon and sports cards to One Piece, Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! decks. Admission is just $3, with veterans, first responders and children 12 and under getting in free, and organizers are throwing in a boba truck, a small petting zoo and a cosplay contest for good measure.
The single-day show is the work of Charles Nunez, an Iraq War veteran who founded both Charlie's Comic Con and Charlie's TCG Events without any prior background in convention promotion, according to the Tampa Bay 28 report. Nunez has now organized 15 shows across Florida and New Jersey, as detailed by the Osprey Observer, building his business around the idea of connecting small vendors with fans at accessible local events. The Tampa stop is part of a broader 2026 Florida tour that has also taken his shows through Melbourne, West Palm Beach, Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, per WFIT.
A Waterfront Venue With Its Own History
The Egypt Shrine Center sits at 5017 E. Washington Street along the Palm River, a 25,000-square-foot facility with four flexible event spaces, a Grand Ballroom and a full-service bar, according to Visit Tampa Bay. The venue regularly rents out space for public festivals, trade shows and community gatherings. The current building dates to a formal cornerstone ceremony led by the Florida Masonic Grand Master on July 9, 2022, when the Shriners organization relocated its fraternal operations to the modern Palm River site, per the Egypt Shriners.
Free parking and family-friendly programming round out the day's offerings, a scale of hospitality that stands in sharp contrast to Tampa's biggest pop culture gatherings. Just this week, Hoodline reported that the Tampa Bay Comic Convention drew roughly 42,000 attendees in 2024 and generated an estimated $5.8 million in local economic impact, according to City of Tampa figures. Tampa expects $149 million in overall economic impact this year across 101 major convention center events, and the Tampa Convention Center alone projected 82,000 summer visitors across 16 major events generating over $35 million, according to a Tampa Bay 28 news broadcast covering METROCON and the Tampa Bay Comic Convention.
A Small Show Riding a Multi-Billion-Dollar Wave
Charlie's TCG Con is a fraction of that size, but it taps into an industry growing at a striking clip. The global trading card game market was valued at an estimated $12.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $27.6 billion by 2034, according to Dataintelo, fueled by expanding collectible culture and anime franchise crossover appeal. The United States alone accounted for 29% of that global market in 2023, hosting more than 3,500 tournaments and producing over 3.2 billion domestic card sales, per Industry Research, with American collectors generating 41% of global rare card trading.
That demand is exactly why shows like Nunez's exist: dedicated collectors want a place to buy, sell and trade in person, at prices far below the entry fee of a mega-convention. One Piece, one of the games featured heavily at the Tampa show, comes from Eiichiro Oda's manga series, which holds a Guinness World Record with more than 500 million copies published across 60 countries — a scale of popularity Hoodline detailed in its coverage of a recent One Piece fan gathering in Inglewood. Surging North American demand for One Piece cards has sparked secondary-market resale sprees that make individual rare cards worth real money on the trade floor.
Security Concerns Loom Over High-Value Cards
That same rising value has made vendor booths a target elsewhere. Earlier this month, Hoodline reported that a vendor at Anime NYC in Manhattan lost $9,600 worth of Pokémon cards to theft as 170,000 attendees packed the Javits Center, underscoring how rising secondary-market prices have turned card tables into potential targets nationwide. There is no indication in available reporting that Tampa's show has faced similar incidents, but the episode illustrates the stakes for dealers bringing valuable inventory to any public trading floor.
For now, Charlie's TCG Con is positioning itself as the low-cost, community-scale alternative to Tampa's blockbuster conventions — a single Saturday of card tables, cosplay and a petting zoo rather than a weekend-long downtown takeover. Doors open at the Egypt Shrine Center at 10 a.m. on September 12, with the show wrapping up at 4 p.m.
