at the card fair New Jersey On Saturday, table after table, almost every dealer had Luka Doncic trading cards for sale.
His stock can only go up, right?
Trading cards are the star of the COVID era as young people are drawn to modern basketball cards. In the simplest form of gambling, they buy boxes, pull out cards from Doncic, Ja Morant and Zion Williamson, and send them to PSA and other companies for scoring.
When they got them back, some of the cards were instantly flipped on eBay for thousands of dollars each. Others are waiting to play the latest fantasy basketball game.
idea? Get the cards of future stars and hopefully they will do well and the cards will go up.
question? NBA licensee Panini made a ton of cards, which were graded and sliced in record numbers. That’s when those flippers discovered that this wasn’t a simple fantasy game after all.
Doncic had just led the Dallas Mavericks to their first playoff series win since 2011 before knocking out the No. 1-seeded Phoenix Suns in Game 7.
If it were a simple fantasy game, his cards would sell for record prices.
But on Monday night, a 2018-19 Doncic Panini Prizm base card (PSA 10) in top condition sold for $419. In 2020, the card goes up to $2,500.
As Doncic grew in popularity, more and more cards in perfect condition were removed from packaging and graded by PSA on eBay. On May 7, 2021, the card price dropped below $1,000 and has been on a downward spiral ever since.
The grading numbers are pretty scary for anyone investing in Luka base Prizms.
According to the PSA, 34,166 of these cards were graded by the PSA. gem rate. This makes it the fourth highest rated basketball card of all time.
Of these, 18,467 were rated Gem Mint 10s by PSA, making it the third-most mint card graded by card graders.
“Panini Prizm runs are the highest rated in the world,” said Bill Sliheet of Superior Sports Investments, who said he bought Doncic base prizm for $25-$50 and ran it in the $900-$1,000 range grading and flipping. “And anyone who joins after 2020 will have a hard time getting their money back.”
It’s not just supply. This is the era.
“People are at home, not playing sports, they can’t gamble, so the only thing people have access to sports is investing in a piece of cardboard,” Sliheet said. “It’s all changed.”
Even the higher-end, rarer silver version of the Tocicka suffered the same fate.
eBay superseller Rick Probstein, who sold $160 million worth of cards and memorabilia on eBay last year, saw it all firsthand.
“Luka is hotter than ever and everything is still a third of what it was before,” Probstein said. “I sold Luka Silver (Monday) night for $3,100. The highest price on these cards is $9,500.”
On Monday, odd-lot Collectable said they had received a $350,000 takeover offer to purchase the 1/1 Luka card originally launched on June 19, 2021, for a shareholder value of $682,000.
There’s still upside, Probstein said, but like a good live gambler, sellers need to know when to push the button.
“He went to the Finals, and that silver medal was $4,000,” Probstein said. “Then he won the championship, became Finals MVP, and the card was $6,000. The problem is that a lot of these cards came out of woodwork, and just in terms of volume, this card went back and forth before you knew it. It’s $3,000. We’ve seen it a million times. Some news hits the market and the card goes up 10% to 20%, so a lot of people come out and then come back down.”
Just look at Ja Morant.
“You couldn’t find a better candidate than Ja,” Probstein said. “If you bought his silver Prizm before the season, your losses ranged from 20% to break even.”
PSA’s Highest Rated Basketball Card Ever
Source: GemRate
| player | card | Number of graded cards |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Zion Williamson | 2019 Awards | 39,408 |
| 2. Ja Morant | 2019 Awards | 37,295 |
| 3. Michael Jordan | 1990 Friar | 36,579 |
| 4. Luka Doncic | 2018 Awards | 34,166 |
| 5. Kobe Bryant | 1996 Topps | 29,679 |
