By Michael Moore, PWTorch Collectibles specialist

In Brief: Collectors have driven up the value of Tyler Black. Could they soon do the same for Sami Zayn?

Card Show #30: Sami Zayn

Brian Kelley’s Missouri Wrestling Revival (MWR) trading card effort has produced the first trading cards of stars WWE, TNA and ROH. Seth Rollins, Davey Richards, Eddie Edwards, Michael Elgin, Kenny King, the Briscoe Brothers, Kyle O’Reilly, and Marshall and Ross Von Erich all made their trading card debut in the MWR set.

Also in the MWR set is another wrestler that fans of WWE and NXT may recognize - well, sort of.

Before he was putting on show-stealing matches against the likes of Antonio Cesaro and Tyler Breeze in NXT, Sami Zayne was a star on the independents as the masked El Generico. Kelley included the masked man on card #60 in his first set of cards, which he has been designing and selling since 2010.




Kelley sells the cards to fans directly for $1.50 per card at MissouriWrestlingRevival.com. If you’re wondering what kind of upside a card like this has, consider card #10 in that same set – Tyler Black.

Kelley was the first to produce a trading card of then-ROH World Champion Tyler Black, better known to many fans as Seth Rollins. In 2010 Kelley sold that card for $1.50, and it quickly sold out. By 2013, Rollins had become a WWE star as part of the Shield, and the same card was regularly selling on eBay for $5. Over the last few months, sales of the card have really taken off, with many auctions ending at $20 and some ending as high as $37.99.

More and more collectors are starting to chase rare, early cards of WWE stars, thanks to sets like Kelley’s MWR and the FCW trading cards from 2011 and 2012. Zayn is creating a lot of buzz in NXT and if he catches on the same way in WWE, his MWR card as El Generico could be a treasure for collectors. It’s still available for $1.50 at MissouriWrestlingRevival.com.

Zayn’s only other card to date is a 2014 Topps WWE NXT Prospects insert #16. That card is currently selling in the $1-2 range.

PWTorch Collectibles Specialist Michael Moore can be reached at michaelmoorewriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @MMooreWriter .

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