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Why this card market boom is different
Or is it the COVID bubble all over again
Will Stern
September 28, 2026
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.