Robbin Stowers may be the greatest grandmother in sports card hobby history.
While her three grandsons sat in class at school on Wednesday, April 15th, she arrived at Hot Corner Sports Cards in Mesa, Ariz. at 8 a.m. for the release of 2025 Topps Chrome Football — the company’s first NFL licensed card set in more than 15 years. The store wouldn’t open for another hour, but she made sure she was the first customer in line. Stowers purchased the first Hobby box sold (the store’s limit due to high demand) and a couple of the smaller Value boxes for her boys.
After school, grandsons Dylan, Harrison and Stephen came to her house to rip open packs of the highly anticipated set. Robbin handed each of the boys one pack.
“Take a deep breath and go slow because there are only a few packs,” Robbin recalled telling the boys.
In his first pack from the Hobby box (which includes 20 packs with four cards in each), 10-year-old Stephen pulled what looked like a ticket. Dylan, 15, and Harrsion, 12, then started screaming. It startled Stephen, who then said, “It’s a really cool Josh Allen ticket.” Then Dylan and Harrison lost their minds with jubilation, jumping up and down.
It wasn’t a game ticket — Stephen pulled the redemption card for arguably the set’s most prized item: the one-of-one Josh Allen NFL Honors gold shield (game worn) autographed card. The Buffalo Bills quarterback wore gold NFL shield patches on his jerseys last season to commemorate his 2024 NFL MVP season.
INCREDIBLE: The 1/1 Josh Allen Gold Shield autograph card was found by a 10-year-old collector in Mesa, AZ.
A grandma took her grandchildren to their local card shop to split a box of Topps Chrome Football. The youngest grandson opened a pack and found the card of a LIFETIME 🔥 pic.twitter.com/K4KT3Viwsm
— Topps (@Topps) April 16, 2026
Within the pandemonium, Robbin instructed the boys not to damage the redemption card, even though the real value is the code hidden under the scratch-off area. Dylan ran to grab a magnetic card case. Robbin and the boys brought the redemption card back to Hot Corner owner Phil Rinella to make sure the redemption was actually for the coveted Allen card.
“Before we went to Phil, the first thing (the boys) thought they were going to get to either meet Josh Allen or go to a Bills game and meet him or whatever. I said, ‘No, honey, I don’t think it works that way.’ And so when we went to the store, Phil kind of explained what the ticket was and what he thought maybe it was worth.”
Any sort of disappointment disappeared pretty quickly once Rinella, Topps and Fanatics Collect explained the potential value.
The Allen card will be up for auction on Fanatics Collect starting Thursday night, closing on May 21. Allen’s most expensive card ever sold publicly (his 2018 Panini National Treasures one-of-one holo gold jersey patch autographed rookie numbered 1 of 10) went for $288,000 via auction through Goldin in May 2022. While not an Allen rookie card, it’s possible this 2025 Topps Chrome card could become his most expensive card to date given the unique nature of the gold shield patches.
Topps has a similar gold league logo patch program with Major League Baseball. The highest sales for the 2025 Topps Chrome gold MVP Logoman one-of-one autographed cards from MLB include a $3 million sale for the Shohei Ohtani solo version in December 2025 (the highest public sale of an Ohtani card, according to online card sales database Card Ladder) and a $2.16 million sale for the Ohtani/Aaron Judge dual version in March 2026.
“The person who buys this Josh Allen card, this might be the best Allen card ever to some extent, given how the other gold Logoman cards have sold,” Fanatics Collect vice president Kevin Lenane said. “The Logoman and the Debut patches, they’re different in that way, right? Like that Josh Allen has a rookie card that’s different than this, but just to see the phenomenon of those patches and the weight that that carries has been pretty remarkable.
“I don’t know whether it’ll be his best card ever, but certainly with that shield, it certainly might be. So it will be interesting to see where the non-rookie Logoman and (NFL) shield cards stack up.”
Now will Stephen take home all of the money from the auction since he pulled the card from his pack? In true grandparent fashion, Robbin will divvy out the money to each of the three grandsons she handed the packs by chance. But everyone agreed Robbin should also be part of the stakes thanks to her persistence of being first in line.
And how will some of that money be spent? Robbin said Dylan already possessed a lengthy wishlist of cards before hitting the Allen card. But she’s sure he’ll spend some on a Kaiju card, one of the most sought after and more valuable insert cards in 2025 Topps Chrome Football.
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