u/Cards-Mania

Been chewing on this and want to bounce it off you all.

The April 2024 private sale of the CGC Pristine 10 Alpha Black Lotus through Pristine Collectibles set a new public record at $3M. Guinness logged it. The card is genuinely population-of-one at that grade, which means it's not directly comparable to any prior PSA 10 sale.

My read on the data so far:

1. Heavily played Alpha hasn't moved much. Still trading $45K to $60K depending on centering and condition tells. The $3M sale doesn't directly influence this segment because the buyer pool is fundamentally different.

2. PSA 9 Alpha and high-grade Beta seem to have benefited the most. The narrative pull of "Lotus broke $3M" has pulled the next tier up, especially for signed Rush copies. I've seen PSA 9 Alpha asks creeping toward $100K territory that would have been six-figure-curious a year ago.

3. Unlimited has barely budged. Still the entry door, still $10K-15K HP.

The question I keep coming back to: is the $3M number actually a meaningful comp for anything other than itself? Or is it a one-off ceiling event that gets cited in marketing for the next decade but doesn't actually shift the median market?

Curious what people who track the high-end market more closely than I do are seeing. Are dealers using the $3M sale in their sell-side conversations or is it being treated as the outlier it probably is?

(For what it's worth, I think the more interesting story is the artist's proof and signed market. Rush is gone. Every signed copy is now a finite asset. That's where I'd expect the next quiet 5x to come from.)

 

Spent the last few days digging into the 1987 Terrorist Attack set. Almost nothing in the popular version of the story holds up against primary sources, and the actual story is much more interesting.

A few things I learned:

The "Piedmont Candy Co. of Detroit" printed on the wrappers was a fake company. The real creator was Charles Mandel of Sports Design Products in Hazel Park, Michigan. He used the cover name partly to keep his real address off the cards.

In a 1987 interview Mandel called himself a "rabid American right-winger" and said he sent free sets to Reagan, George Shultz, and Oliver North. He reportedly told reporters he didn't really care if the cards made money.

The set was never banned. Kurt Kuersteiner's 2006 piece for The Wrapper magazine specifically calls the supposed backlash "more of a tempest in a teapot." The cards quietly sold through normal hobby channels and were never reprinted because there was just one print run.

The set includes Hitler and Mussolini (state actors with uniformed militaries, not really terrorists by any standard definition) and Charles Manson (cult leader and convicted murderer, also not a terrorist). The working definition was extremely loose.

The most genuinely eerie part: cards in the set imagined nuclear, poison gas, and car bomb attacks on New York City, the Statue of Liberty, and domestic nuclear power plants. This was 14 years before 9/11.

Anyone here actually own a sealed box or pack? Curious what the live market looks like for sealed material since complete loose sets are pretty cheap.

Been down a rabbit hole on this one and it's one of my favorite cardboard stories ever.

Card #497 in the 1985 Topps set. Supposed to be California Angels center fielder Gary Pettis. Except the player on the card is actually his younger brother Lynn, who was 14 at the time.

Here's how it went down:

The Angels held Family Day events where relatives could wear uniforms and mess around on the field. Lynn came out, hung around the dugout in Gary's gear, and a Topps photographer named Owen C. Shaw walked up and asked if he could take his picture. Lynn said yes. Shaw apparently thought he was photographing Devon White.

Gary wasn't even aware cards were being shot that day. He didn't see the finished card until months later when a friend commented he looked really young. Gary told MLB.com in 2018: "Lo and behold, when I finally saw the baseball card later that year I couldn't help but laugh and go, yeah, I do look pretty young because it's not me. It's my brother."

Topps never issued a correction. Every single #497 in circulation shows Lynn.

A few wrinkles that make it even better:

- Topps originally claimed it was a prank arranged by Gary (their spokesperson told USA Today that in June 1985). Gary has always denied this.

- Gary refuses to sign this card. He figures fans are just flipping them online and he doesn't want to help. He tells people to chase a Lynn Pettis autograph instead.

- Topps had the correct Gary photographed for his 1984 Traded card just months earlier. They knew what he looked like. The wire got crossed anyway.

Values are modest since it's a junk wax era card. Raw copies go for a few bucks, PSA 10s maybe $40-50. But it's one of those cards I love way more than anything with a bigger number next to it.

Anyone here have one? Ever tried to get Lynn to sign it?

The official Bandai audio drama "2 and a Half Year Break" (2003) puts Mimi Tachikawa at Ground Zero helping with rescue efforts. Director Hiroyuki Kakudou has referenced it publicly. Most English-speaking fans never knew because it was Japan-only with fan translations.

It's one of several wild facts I found while writing a full Digimon Card Game collector's guide: history, rarity breakdown, the most valuable cards in the current market, and where to buy.

Link in first comment.