It’s been a few years since I published anything here. And don’t get too comfortable reading me in your inbox — this isn’t about to become a weekly thing. Really, I just wanted to give my take (and examine the data) on today’s unbelievable card market.
And although I’m not writing very much these days — my time is now spent at cllct working with teams, brands and leagues on their collectible strategy — I will definitely be dropping in every so often to share whatever inane thought happened to cross my mind.
A 1/1 basketball card featuring game-used "Logoman" patches and autographs from both Kobe Bryant and LeBron James sold Thursday night for $6.5 million.
The sale became the 10th-most expensive publicly-known card sale in history.
Yet, it hardly received any buzz on social media the following day.
That's because within hours of the sale, on the same evening (more accurately: early morning), Cooper Flagg's NBA Debut Patch Auto 1/1 card fetched more than $8 million.
It's a perfect metaphor for just how blazing hot the card market is these days: Record-breaking sales have not only become laughably frequent, but completely normalized. Thus far in 2026, as the year is not yet 75% of the way through, 65 cards have sold for $1 million or more, up from 7 in all of 2024, and more than 2023–2025 combined (47). On average, a card has cleared the $1 million mark every 4.1 days.
Déjà vu
If you have been around the collectibles space for a few years, then watching all of this over the last few months may have felt like déjà vu. A few years ago, a similar phenomenon took hold in the card world. During the COVID pandemic, the values of cards began surging, and surging, and surging.
It was unlike anything even the most tenured members of the collecting world had ever seen, let alone believed possible.
Michael Jordan rookies (PSA 10) which were selling for under $30,000 in 2019 had cleared $200,000 by the end of 2020.
Not to be outdone, the 1999 Pokémon Charizard 1st Edition Holo (PSA 10) leapt from around $15,000 to more than $350,000 by the end of 2020.
Six-figure sales, for the first time in the long history of people caring way too much about cardboard, became table stakes. Some of the biggest voices in the hobby began to speak about cards as financial assets — I seem to recall the phrase "investments of passion" became quite popular — and this shift in perspective seemed to resonate.
In 2019, there were around 76 recorded card sales of $100,000 or more and just 2 of $1 million or more.
In 2020, six-figure sales rose to around 190, including 11 sales of $1 million-plus.
The next year, in 2021, things got really nuts: 936 sales of $100,000 or more and 44 sales of $1 million and higher.
There may not be a better illustration of just how quickly the high-end grew over those years than taking a look at the top 20 sales each year.
Watch how the 20th-largest sale grew from 2019 to 2021:
2019: $252,000
2020: $570,000
2021: $2.03 million
The point is, the numbers on the charts went up and to the right, and they did so at a rapid pace.
The bubble burst
But with all of this talk of the financialization of this market, including plenty of individuals and companies which pursued sober investment strategies into what they deemed "grail" cards during this time (to varying degrees of success), one inevitable question hovered in the air: When is the bubble going to burst? Not "will." "When." It didn't take an economics degree or a particularly keen financial mind to realize the party couldn't last forever.
Unsurprisingly, the irrational exuberance powering the boom during that time faded. While the market did not cede all of the ground it had gained since 2019, it was impossible to argue that the bubble hadn't burst by 2023.
Six-figure sales dropped from 980 in 2022 to 477 in 2023. Seven-figure sales slumped from 41 to 11. Many of the "investors" who made names for themselves thanks to their splashy purchases and loud proclamations of the lofty ROI they expected to see from their cards were stuck holding the bag.
