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How to find out the worth of basketball cards
Basketball Card Price Guide - CardMavin
Use MAVIN to look up your basketball card values. Enter a description of your card into the search box and see the average price it sells for online.
You’ll need a few details:
Enter the year. Look at the back for the copyright date, or the last year of stats.
Enter the brand. For example: Topps, Upper Deck, Fleer, Hoops, etc.
Enter the player’s name.
Enter the card number. Found on the back of the card.
Search for:
Looking up a Basketball Card’s Value
The search results will show basketball card prices, based on recently sold cards… hopefully just like yours. The “worth” that initially shows is the average price (including shipping) of the results showing on the page.
Use the Checkboxes
If you get a lot of results that don’t match your basketball card, try adding more details to your search. You can also use the checkboxes to get an average price. Pick a few comparable items (“comps”). This gives you a much more accurate estimate of what your basketball card is worth.
Graded Cards
To look up graded basketball cards, enter the grading company and grade, for example PSA 9 or BGS 9.
What to do Next
Once you’ve gone through and searched for the value of your basketball cards using our price guide, you have several different options:
If they’re valuable: You can either hold onto the cards, perhaps get them graded if not already, and see if they appreciate in value over time. Alternatively, you sell it to a local card shop, but keep in mind dealers pay wholesale prices… they have to make a profit after all, and selling a large collection takes a considerable amount of time and resources… so don’t expect to get eBay prices for your basketball cards when you sell to a dealer. If you have the time and patience, you can sell it yourself on eBay and get a competitive price. Read our guide to selling on eBay.
If not: Basketball cards don’t have to be worth money to be considered valuable. Card collecting has been a beloved hobby that has been passed through generations. Each card has sentimental value to someone: where they found it, how they traded for it, who gave it to them. If your cards aren’t worth money, they could be worth some memories to a relative or a stranger. Put them on Craigslist, take them to a card shop, donate them, or hold onto them to give to the next generation.
Author Andrew FordPosted on Categories BasketballLeave a comment on Free Price Guide for Basketball Card Values
We monitor every eBay sale for Basketball Cards. Using our proprietary technology; We assign each sale to a Card, toss the junk, and record the grade of each sale.
Our Basketball Card pricing algorithm then determines the value for each Card for each grade. You can see historic prices for every Card so you know which Basketball Cards are increasing in price and which are dropping.
Using these prices and our collection tracker, you can keep track of how much your Basketball Card collection is worth.
The most expensive basketball cards of November-December - Hobby: Collectible cards - Blogs
Hobby: Collectible cards
Blog
Hello everyone!
After a short break, the top most expensive basketball cards are back. Today we will capture 2 months - November and December.
In order for the cards of different periods to be presented in the top, I divided it into three parts: before the 90s, the 90s and the first half of the 00s and the last 10 years.
Let's go from new cards to old ones (most often this means an increase in cost).
So, the top 4 most expensive new cards.
4) In fourth place is a 1/1 LeBron James card from Flawless 2015-16 with the NBA logo. They paid $10,300 for it.
3) Next is newcomer Steph Curry from Topps Chrome 2009-10. The gold parallel in this collection has a circulation of 50 copies. Added to this is the almost perfect condition of the card, and the total price is $10,600.
2) And the same amount was paid for a Karl-Anthony Towns card with a mourning patch dedicated to Flip Saunders of Flawless 2015-16.
1) And in the first place, 2 league logos and two Golden State stars - the same Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. It's the same Flawless collection from last season. The price of this card is $12,000 without one dollar.
Further older cards. I will say in advance that all 4 are from the second half of the 90s
4-3) And open the top two cards of Michael Jordan with a jersey and an autograph. In the first case, the card in this form was inserted into the blocks of the Upper Deck 19 collection98-99 - a kind of parallel with the autograph with a circulation of 23 copies. $10,999 was paid for the card. And the second card in the collection of the previous season was a regular unnumbered jersey. For a re-release in 2013, an autograph was at stake in the Jordan collection. The resulting result was estimated at $15,000.
2) Next, another overlay of the top newcomer from Topps Chrome. This time it's Kobe Bryant and the 1995-96 collection. Plus, the card itself is in excellent condition. Price $17500.
1) And in the first place is the red parallel Metall Universe PMG by Michael Jordan with an edition of only 100 copies. In addition, the card number 23/100 is of additional interest. It should also be noted that the card was sent to the PSA for an authenticity check, but not for a condition assessment. The rating would not be high - edge damage (not rare for cards of this sub-series) is visible to the naked eye. As a result, the card was sold for $21453.
Well, the oldest top contains only the classic rookie cards of future NBA legends.
4) And this list opens with Wilt Chamberlain's map from the Fleer collection from 1961. The condition of the card is 9 points out of 10 possible, and the price is $32,211.
3-2) Next, two cards from rookie Michael Jordan. Moreover, for a rarer 9-point card from Star-85, they paid more ($40,207) than for a 10-point card from Fleer-86 ($35,999).
1) Well, absolutely out of competition is the triple card of Larry Bird, Julius Irving and Magic Johnson - the main newcomers of the 1979 season-80 from Topps. Three members of the Hall of Fame + the perfect condition of the card itself gave a total of $96423.
Thank you for your attention!
Almost $2 million for an autographed card - is that normal? A new way to make money on sports
In the era of digitalization, when one of the dominant algorithms is to get the maximum you want in the shortest possible time, collecting is often perceived as a relic of the times. At best, it is associated with the quirks of the elderly rich, at worst - with the hoarding of infantile freaks who diligently laminate individual copies of comics. Strange as it may seem, these general outlines of the mass idea of gathering and collecting could once indeed be considered a reflection of the main idea of the varieties of this activity. But just as outlines and sketches become paintings over time, so collecting in the 21st century has become a huge industry. Paradoxically, it is very closely tied to digitalization. And this sign of the times can be most clearly seen in that branch of collecting that until recently was considered children's entertainment: collecting sports cards.
You must have heard that a LeBron James card was recently sold for a record $1.8 million for modern items (those produced since 1980) , but hardly aware of all the nuances that influenced its cost. It gave not only in quantity (a total of 23 such cards were issued) and certainly not in James' autograph. The brand of the card, the record rating on the Beckett scale (a special gradation by which the value of an item is determined) and the time period during which the value of the LeBron card was formed played a huge role. According to auctioneer Ken Goldin, there would not have been such a fuss about the amount of the sale if it were rarities like the Mickey Mantle baseball card, issued in 1952nd year. Immediately, all experts were shocked by the record short 17-year period during which the card added in price. Goldin, like many collectors, believes that the reasons for this rapid growth are directly related to changes that will soon attract a large number of new people with money to the industry and make collecting even more similar to investment funds. Sounds loud and ambitious, but not convincing enough. So why is it profitable to invest in collecting right now?
Marking and production
Many consider the sport of the period from the early 80s to the late 90s to be a golden age, however, a huge number of cards with players from these eras are not much sought after by collectors today. The fact is that at that time the sports card industry was just in its infancy, manufacturing companies regarded their product as a quick way to cut more money from naive and avid kids for images of their idols. Children, being the main target audience, of course, did not have a couple of extra millions in their pockets, so the prices for the cards were low. Manufacturers, quite expectedly, did not want production costs to exceed the final cost, so cards were printed in huge quantities and on cheap machines. As a result, the market was oversaturated with cheap goods.
that you can work for the adult segment. Industry giants such as Panini Prizms, Optic Holos, Flawless, Immaculate began to produce limited edition cards and design them in accordance with fashion trends. A hologram, an autograph of an athlete, a part of the jersey in which he performed, a serial number confirming the authenticity of the copy - all this significantly increased the external attractiveness of the cards, their cost and the speed of pricing relative to the time period from the moment of printing. Now some examples are quite drawn to a finely executed work of art.
Liquid market
Social networks and the Internet have given collectors a lot of room to maneuver. Whereas before avid fans had to rely only on reading Beckett Basketball Card Magazine and exchanging cards through long mail correspondence, now on eBay alone there is a huge community of auctioneers, buyers, sellers and other hucksters who call themselves fortune-catchers in high society. Websites, online auctions, festivals, exhibitions, conventions have become an ordinary and integral part of the collecting industry in a short time. People who qualify this for themselves as a professional activity are not much different from financiers who play on the stock exchange. They catch the rise and fall of card prices depending on the player’s statistics, his injuries, his transfer to another team, and so on. This again catapults us to the question of how closely statistics and modern technology interact with collecting. To understand how serious people are about investing in collecting, it is enough to mention the person who bought that very LeBron card for 1.8 million.
The lucky winner is Leor Avidar, 30, one of the two founders of the automated mailing service and Lob.com software. Together with his friend Harry Zhang, Avidar has repeatedly been included in various Forbes lists, but still calls collecting his main activity. It is clear that the rich have their own quirks, but the man who left Microsoft at 23 and successfully started his own business after that probably knows what he is talking about.
Collecting is a safer form of betting
Betting is booming - a fact. Bloggers, athletes, TV channels, movie and show business stars offer to try their luck at their own expense every 5 minutes. What is there, 60% of the English Premier League teams have a betting office as a title sponsor. The mantra that it is impossible to make money on bets has long been perceived by many as a challenge: everyone is trying to prove the opposite, in an attempt to refute the obvious, losing their cash. The market for collecting sports cards is vast, but in terms of its mass character, it is not even close to playing on bets. This makes it no less interesting and safer.
Involvement in the field of collecting keeps the excitement, but reduces the risk of loss. You have the opportunity to get to know the collector better before selling or buying a copy of this or that card from him. You seem to be inside an industry that at the same time has a human face. In the end, no one bothers to combine one with the other: if you lose on bets, you can always get a rare card from the bins and try to sell it at exorbitant prices.
Basketball is booming!
And this is objective. The phrase “perfect storm” has had mostly negative connotations over the past year, but in the context of the collecting industry and everything that is happening now in the NBA, the meaning remains paramount. Here are just some of the reasons why collecting basketball card menus is especially profitable today.
The NBA is an all-star league, and that's axiom . The biggest personal contracts, the most unparalleled indulgences, the most personalized stories, the star players, in fact, form the teams themselves. The NFL will never cease to be the most popular and popular sport in America, but the personality of the league owner and commissioner there always prevails over the personality of the player. In the NBA, everything is different, here all the attention is focused on the basketball players, they are the main characters, and the deliberate media accent only makes their personas brighter and more attractive. All this gives the players the aura of superheroes, in turn, this image component allows you to sell cards with NBA players more expensive and more often.
In basketball, a player can become a star in virtually any position . Especially now, when the lack of roles is becoming a sign of the times. Marcus Smart defends against Anthony Davis, Joel Embiid shoots from behind the arc, Nikola Jokic plays combinations, Houston plays four small and one large. By and large, there are no center, powerful forwards and point guards anymore. In basketball, at the end of each season, three symbolic teams are assembled, each of which has five star players. There is a huge amount of potential for collectors in the NBA. It's not the case in American football, where pronounced stars predominate mainly in three positions: quarterback, running back and receiver. Cards with players of these positions are in the price, but the rest are not sold so willingly. American football is a game of schemes, chess is on the field, the work of each player here is strictly functional, and there is not much room for improvisation. The situation is similar with baseball, where pitchers and hitters run the show, and defense players dutifully perform their duties. This doesn't make the NFL or MLB worse than the NBA, but it drastically reduces the number of characters whose flashy performances could drive up the price of a card with their image. The same goes for the NHL with European football, sports that are themselves less in demand in the United States.
Injury . Damage and stress will happen in the NBA, but this is not the NFL, where it is quite normal to end a career after 7-10 seasons. And this is about the average duration. In this contact sport - as in hockey - every hit can send even the most status player to the end of the line for severance pay. MLB has its own characteristics: pitchers, one of the two most sought-after positions among collectors, throw balls at a speed of 150 kilometers per hour over and over again and invariably cripple hands, elbows and shoulder joints. These are chronic injuries, after which baseball players rarely return to their previous level. So basketball is here, although relatively, but still in a privileged position.
Globalization . Collecting is not only a privilege of the United States, where American football is popular, and baseball has already become not so much a sport as a cultural tradition. Basketball is global and in its popularity it is much more representative than hockey, so we do not read news about the record purchases of cards with the names of Teemu Selanne or Jaromir Jagr, with all due respect to these great people. Additional excitement was added by the international generation of NBA stars: Giannis, Jokic, Sabonis, Gobert, Hachimura and, of course, Doncic. Card Panini Prizm RC Luka Doncic 2018/2019now one of the fastest growing in price.