Arizona's Cactus TCG Show Mixes 130 Vendor Tables With Retro Games and Smash

Phoenix’s Cactus TCG Show hosts 130+ vendor tables at El Zaribah Shrine, bringing trading card collectors together with retro cartridge hunters and Smash competitors.

The Cactus TCG Show is spending September 26 and 27 at the El Zaribah Shrine Auditorium & Conference Center in Phoenix, Arizona, combining the increasingly enormous trading-card scene with retro videogames, collectibles and a Super Smash Bros. tournament. More than 130 vendor tables are advertised, with Pokémon, One Piece, Dragon Ball, Lorcana, Magic: The Gathering and other card games occupying much of the floor alongside classic games, toys and collectibles. Retro videogames are not the event's sole focus, but their presence at shows like this is worth watching because the collector markets have increasingly converged. The person searching for a particular Game Boy cartridge may now be standing beside somebody chasing a graded Pokémon card while both attempt to understand why an object they remember costing pocket money suddenly requires financial planning. Free admission and parking make the event considerably friendlier than some collector conventions, particularly as vintage-game prices continue to produce occasional involuntary laughter. The Smash tournament also gives the weekend a playable videogame component rather than reducing gaming entirely to sealed objects in plastic cases. That distinction matters. Collecting is an important part of preservation, but videogames become rather peculiar historical artefacts when nobody is willing to insert them into a machine. The Phoenix event continues today, September 27. Between cards, cartridges and tournament controllers, it offers a neat snapshot of where hobby collecting sits in 2026: several once-separate nerd kingdoms have discovered they were sharing the same shopping bag all along.