Nineteen new perfect Jordans in five and a half years

The usual objection to this card as a serious holding is that it is not rare. That is true and it misses the point. PSA alone has graded more than 28,000 of them. You can buy one this afternoon. Ungraded copies trade for a few thousand dollars.

What is rare is a perfect one, and the reason has nothing to do with how many were printed.

The card has a bold red border running to all four edges. Red shows everything. A corner touched once in 1986 shows, an edge nicked in a binder shows, and the border leaves nowhere for a printing misalignment to hide either. About 1.19 per cent of everything PSA grades on this card comes back a 10.

That ratio has barely shifted, which means the supply of gem copies is close to fixed. Cards keep getting submitted. The good ones were found a long time ago.

What that has done to the price

Not a straight line. Anyone who tells you this card only goes up is selling something.

Read the middle of that table rather than the ends. Between January and July 2021 the card printed $738,000, then $288,000, then $840,000 - a swing of nearly three times inside seven months, on a card whose population moved by a handful of copies in the same period.

Then it fell. By August 2025 PSA 10s were changing hands around $200,000, roughly a quarter of the July 2021 peak. Since then it has recovered: $268,000 at Goldin in March 2026 and $360,000 at SCP Auctions on 3 August this year, which is about double where it sat a year earlier.

The card is worth forty-five times what it was a decade ago and less than half what it was five years ago. Both statements are true and neither one is the story on its own.

The tier above tells a different story

Here is the comparison we find most useful.

Across PSA, BGS, SGC and CGC combined, 47,815 copies of this card have been graded. 916 of them are gems. Seven are graded Pristine - the half step above a standard gem - and of those, six sit in BGS holders and exactly one is in an SGC slab.

That single SGC Pristine has sold publicly twice. It made $420,000 at Heritage in August 2020, an all-time record for the card at the time. It sold again in August 2025 for $463,600.

Five years. Up ten per cent.

Over the same five years the PSA 10 went from about $111,000 to $840,000 to $200,000 and back to $360,000. The card one grade step above it barely moved.

That is what a population of one looks like against a population of 335. Not higher returns - steadier ones. When there are 335 of something, a hot market has 335 objects to bid on and the price runs. When there is one, the price is whatever two people decide between themselves, and there is no crowd to create a stampede or a panic.

What we take from it

Three things, and none of them is a recommendation.

The population is the thing to watch, not the print run. Twenty-eight thousand graded copies tells you almost nothing about how hard a gem is to buy. Nineteen new tens in five and a half years tells you a great deal.

A single price is close to useless here. Quote $840,000 and you are describing July 2021. Quote $200,000 and you are describing August 2025. Both were real sales of the same thing. This is exactly why every card on this index carries its sales with dates attached rather than a value.

Condition scarcity and print scarcity behave differently. A card that is scarce because few were made has a fixed supply and a stable story. A card that is scarce because few survive in grade has a supply that creeps upward forever, slowly, as submissions continue - and a price that responds to sentiment far more violently. We wrote about that distinction in more detail here.

The opposite extreme is worth seeing too. The 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookie has been graded more than 13,000 times and exactly two are PSA 10s, for reasons that have nothing to do with how many were made - we went through why that is here. Same mechanism as the Jordan, dialled to its limit.

If you want the card's full history, printing, population by grade and its recorded sales in one place, there is a reference page for it at CardboardFile.

Every card on this index shows what is listed now and what has verifiably sold, and you can read how we work the numbers out.

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