Nobody put Alton Lister in a sleeve

I want to explain this properly, because it is the single most counterintuitive thing about graded cards and most explanations of it are hand-waving.

Alton Lister was a seven-foot centre who played sixteen seasons and was never an All-Star. His best year was 1986-87 in Seattle, where he averaged 11.6 points. Nobody collected Alton Lister. Nobody has ever collected Alton Lister.

And his 1987 Fleer card in a PSA 10 costs more than most people's entire collection.

The numbers, because they are ridiculous

That same card in a PSA 8 trades for somewhere between three and seventeen dollars. In a PSA 9, sixty five to a hundred. In a PSA 10, the April 2025 sale was $16,078.

Across every recorded auction of that card, eighty nine sales in total, the whole lot adds up to around $36,600. One PSA 10 is approximately 44% of every dollar ever spent on it.

Eight of them have ever graded a 10.

Why this happens, and it is not about Alton Lister

Here is the mechanism.

The PSA Set Registry lets you build the 1986-87 Fleer basketball set and be ranked against everyone else doing the same. The set is 132 cards. To have a complete set you need all 132. Not most of them. All of them.

So the difficulty of the set is not set by Michael Jordan. It is set by whichever card is hardest to find in top condition, and that will never be the star, because everybody looked after the star.

Think about what actually happened to these cards in 1986. A kid opens a pack, sees Jordan, and puts it somewhere safe. Sees Alton Lister, and it goes in the pile with the rest. Forty years later there are thousands of well-kept Jordans and almost no well-kept Listers, because nobody had any reason to keep one carefully.

The scarcity is real. It was just created by indifference rather than by anything the printer did.

The star is rare too, which makes the comparison sharper

It would be easy to assume Jordan's rookie is common in a 10. It is not. PSA has graded 28,764 of them and about 332 are PSA 10, so roughly one in ninety.

The difference is what the price is made of. Thousands of people want a Jordan rookie, in any grade, forever. So a Jordan PSA 10 is expensive because of demand and scarcity together.

An Alton Lister PSA 10 has almost no natural demand at all. Its price is close to pure scarcity, paid by a small number of people who need that specific card to finish something. Take away the registry and the card is worth three dollars again.

Which is why these prices are stranger than they look

A Jordan rookie has a floor. If the registry vanished tomorrow, people would still want one, because it is Michael Jordan's rookie card.

A common in a 10 does not really have that. Its value depends on enough people continuing to chase complete sets in top grade. That is a smaller and more fragile market than it appears from the sale prices, and it is worth understanding before treating one of these as a store of value.

I am not saying it will not hold. Registry collecting has been going for over twenty years and shows no sign of stopping. I am saying the thing holding the price up is different from what holds up a star card, and anyone buying should know which one they are buying.

The 1986 Fleer set is the extreme case

This set is the one everybody points at, and there are reasons beyond Jordan.

Fleer's production in 1986 was rough. Centering is frequently poor, print quality is inconsistent, and the cards came in packs with a sticker that was often stuck against a card face. So the whole set is condition-sensitive, not just the commons, and a complete run in PSA 10 is genuinely close to impossible. One has been assembled and it was newsworthy when it sold.

Which is the other half of the picture. The commons are hard because nobody kept them, and hard again because Fleer printed them badly.

What to do with this

If you are building a set in high grade, work out which cards are the bottleneck before you start, not after. The population report tells you in about five minutes, and it is the difference between a project you can finish and one you cannot.

If you are buying a single card as an investment, know which kind of price you are paying. Scarcity plus demand is a different proposition from scarcity alone, even when the two look identical on a sales sheet.

And if you find an unloved common from an old set sitting in a shoebox in genuinely sharp condition, it may be worth considerably more than the star sitting next to it. That is not a joke, and it is the reason people still bother going through shoeboxes.

This index tracks the first three seasons of a small group of major players in every grade, including Jordan's Fleer rookie and his second-year card, and you can read how we work the numbers out.