Put on your rally caps: After a decades-long slump, the market for sports cards is coming back big time.

At the peak of their popularity in the early 1990s, sports cards were a billion-dollar industry. But in the years that followed, a series of factors—overproduction, work stoppages in professional leagues, and the rise of Pokémon and other card genres—caused sales to plummet, at one point dropping to just $200 million annually, according to The Athletic. The market was moribund.

Then came the pandemic, and overnight, the value of baseball, basketball, football, and hockey cards boomed. A one-of-a-kind Mike Trout card from 2009 went for $3.9m in 2020; a 2003 LeBron James rookie card fetched $5.2m the following year. A 1952 Mickey Mantle card sold for a record $12.6m in 2022, helping the sports card market reach a value of $12.13b.

Even when the days of quarantine ended, the momentum of this trend did not. A new record high was reached just last year when a 2007–08 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant card sold for $12.9m at Heritage Auctions, and 2026 has already seen several sales in the seven-figure ballpark. What’s more, analysts predict the growth to continue, with many projecting the market to reach $50b by 2030.

It’s hard to imagine trading cards competing with the art market, which saw an estimated $59.6b in sales last year, but little by little, we’re getting closer to that reality. No longer are these collectibles the stuff of hobbyists; now they're an asset class all their own.

The collectors’ code for quite possibly the most coveted series of baseball cards in history, largely thanks to the ultra-rare T206 Honus Wagner card.

“T206” is a designation created by the late collector Jefferson Burdick in The United States Card Collectors Catalog (later renamed The American Card Catalog) in 1939. The “T” indicates that the card series was produced for inclusion in packs of cigarettes and loose tobacco in the 20th century (what a country we were!). “206” was the number Burdick assigned to fit it into his larger sequential classification system. Consumers could smoke or chew their way to T206 cards from 1909–11 if their brand of choice was one of the 16 distributed by the American Tobacco Company.

More than 100 years later, top collectors are competing like major leaguers for prime examples from the series. This is especially true of the T206 Honus Wagner, which at least one expert has called “the Mona Lisa of sports cards.” Although thousands of cards from the overall series made their way to the public, "maybe 60 to 80" of Wagner have been verified to exist today, according to Joe Orlando, Executive Vice President of Sports at Heritage Auctions.

No wonder at least 11 examples of the T206 Wagner are known to have sold for north of $1.9m to date, according to The Athletic. The list includes two cards auctioned in February 2026 alone: one for more than $5.1m at Goldin, the other for around $3.6m at Heritage. The record price for a T206 Wagner ($7.25m) reportedly came in a private deal brokered by Goldin in 2022, but there is chatter within the trade that private transactions north of that number have taken place, too.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

NoReserve ASKed: After its much-discussed debut in Miami last December, Art Basel presented its Zero 10 sector for digital art again last week in Hong Kong. How did the new iteration of the project compare to the first?

Elisa Carollo: Art Basel’s Zero 10 sector returned with the same buzz, but in Hong Kong, the energy felt specific to the local audience. The section was consistently packed, drawing a digitally fluent, highly engaged crowd. In Asia, this reflects a broader reality: cryptocurrencies and other digital infrastructures are embedded in everyday financial life, fostering a collector base already comfortable with alternative systems of exchange and ownership.

Curated by Eli Scheinman, Zero 10 brought together 14 exhibitors with minimal overlap from Miami. At SILK Art House, Jack Butcher’s WORK, LUCK, PLAY translated blockchain logic into a hybrid installation combining sculpture, NFTs, and audience interaction, culminating in a live work shaped by visitor input. Similarly, Claire Silver’s Mary’s Room explored machine empathy through an AI-generated character whose reflections materialized as a continuously printed diary, collapsing the boundary between code and physical form.

A strong current of 1990s nostalgia ran through the section, most notably in Emi Kusano’s Ornament Survival. Blending animation and sculptural objects, Kusano revives mahō shōjo transformation culture, popularized by series like Sailor Moon. By training AI models on her own likeness, she reframes the self as both image and data: scalable, editable, and subject to algorithmic standardization.

Sougwen Chung’s RECURSIONS employed robotic painting systems, reflecting China’s rapid adoption of robotics across industries, embedding automation into everyday life. Meanwhile, DeeKay Kwon’s DeePle The People, commissioned by Art Basel Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Tourism Board, was projected nightly onto the Hong Kong Club Building, capturing collective emotional states through the visual language of retro gaming.

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A new episode of The Baer Faxt Podcast is out now! Host Josh Baer is joined by the wonderful Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, as the gallery celebrates its 30th year in business. Tune in to hear about her early days in Lausanne, how the gallery has evolved and adapted in three decades, and what the future may hold. From Idyllic Switzerland and Beyond with Rachel Lehmann is out now on all major podcast platforms and at thebaerfaxtpodcast.com. This episode is sponsored by Ursula - A Magazine of Contemporary Culture by Hauser & Wirth.

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