Cory Matteson spoke to artists about their experiences designing baseball card art during the current trading card craze (which has also affected Pokémon TCG).
“The business model that I was running before was commission-based, one-to-one sales, so I’d be going out and trying to find people that want to buy my art,” [Blake] Jamieson said. “They pay me, I make a painting, I send it to them. And then I go find the next person. It’s cool; I’ve gotten to work with a lot of amazing people. But Topps put me on the licensing game where I could paint one thing, and then that art ends up in thousands of homes, or in the case of my Mike Trout card, like 75,000 homes, which is insane.”
However, things are changing. MLB has replaced Topps as its trading card manufacturer with Fanatics (who’ve also obtained licenses with the NBA and NFL).