SP № 001
Fanatics Collectibles
The Short Print
Built for our most loyal collectors.
Edition 001
75 Years of Topps
Summer 2026
Built for our most loyal collectors.
Two rooms told the story of this summer. In July, some 200,000 people filled the Javits Center for Fanatics Fest, the most in the event's three-year history, with more than 500 athlete appearances and the championship Knicks carrying the Larry O'Brien Trophy across the floor. Then more than 130,000 collectors made the 46th National in Chicago the best-attended in its history, five days and 600 dealer booths deep, with dealers reporting record sales and some of the most significant cards in the hobby moving from one collection to another in a single room.
The hobby is growing faster than it has in a generation, and it now has gathering places to match. A collection stays a private thing until it can be carried into a room, traded, and talked about with people who understand it, and this summer gave collectors two of the best rooms the hobby has ever had.
.webp)
On April 1, the NFL came home to Topps for the first time in more than a decade. For everyone at Fanatics Collectibles, this is the start of a long project rather than a finish line: a generation of rookies, seasons, and moments waiting to be made into cards, and years of ideas we have been saving for football. We believe the best football cards ever made are still ahead of us.
The Debut Patch began in baseball. This year it reached both football and basketball: a patch worn on a player's jersey during his first NFL or NBA game, removed and authenticated that night, signed, and sealed into a card that exists exactly once. These cards tie a collection to a real evening in a real arena, which is why the hobby has come to treat them as the defining pull of this era. Basketball's first class arrived in August, and by the end of September three of them, Flagg, Harper, and Knueppel, had already been found, graded, and sold.
Topps released its first baseball cards in 1951. The diamond anniversary runs all season: a year-long buyback program returning original vintage cards to packs, up to and including a 1952 Mickey Mantle #311, plus anniversary die-cut autographs and free packs given away at ballparks across the league. Seventy-five years in, the oldest name in the hobby is also its most alive.
The Fanatics Collect September Premier Auction closed on the 24th with four lots above $1 million, and one that rewrote a category. Cooper Flagg's Rookie Debut Patch Autograph, the card pulled on a Rhode Island break in August, sold for $8.04 million, the highest price ever paid for a Debut Patch and for any card on Fanatics Collect. The prior record, Paul Skenes at $1.11 million, had stood for eighteen months. It was beaten three times in one night: Dylan Harper's patch brought $2.88 million and Kon Knueppel's $2.34 million, so the three most expensive Debut Patches in existence now all come from a single rookie class.
Look one layer down and the auction is a study in what collectors actually pay for. The photo: Shohei Ohtani's two 2018 Bowman Chrome Orange autographs, both /25, sold for $810,000 and $324,000, and the only difference is that one shows him hitting and the other pitching. The name: two Gold Logoman dual patches, both /4, both unopened redemptions, brought $336,000 for Ohtani and Judge and $27,600 for Skubal and Skenes. The parallel: Cooper Flagg's Minionfractor trades around $10,000 raw, his Red /5 sold for $43,200, and the Superfractor 1/1 for $276,000, roughly 27 times the base card printed the same night.
Two quieter currents are worth watching. The 1990s inserts that carried Michael Jordan to records in August did the same for his classmates in September: Hakeem Olajuwon's Metal Universe PMG Green /10 brought $228,000, well past its previous high, and Shaquille O'Neal, Rodman, and Penny all set new marks, with Rodman's Star Rubies paying a premium simply because Jordan appears on the card. And signed vintage keeps climbing: a 1933 Sport Kings Babe Ruth autograph at $990,000, a signed 1949 Bowman Jackie Robinson rookie at $468,000, and a signed 1951 Bowman Mantle at $288,000, two months after a signed Robinson Leaf rookie reached $1.86 million. The modern cards made the news. The old ones made the floor.
Top Lots · September 24
Prices include buyer’s premium. Source: Fanatics Collect.
Insert Watch · Kaiju
Ten cards, hobby only, about one in every 116 hobby boxes. When Topps Chrome Football returned in April, Kaiju became the chase before most collectors had opened a pack. The first confirmed sale, a raw Jayden Daniels, brought $13,100 on eBay inside the first week, and within days six of the ten players had cleared $10,000 raw. A PSA 10 Tom Brady then drew more than eighty bids and over a thousand watchers before closing at $23,300, still the top public price for a base Kaiju.
Then the market split in two. In May the Brady Superfractor changed hands privately for $350,000, roughly fifteen times the gem-mint base, the largest Kaiju sale on record and one of the larger football insert sales of the year. Raw base cards have gone the other way as supply caught up: a Mahomes that opened above $4,000 now trades closer to $3,450, down about a fifth over the past month, while graded gems remain scarce enough that a PSA 10 Mahomes sits in the current Goldin catalog with a population of three. Five months in, Kaiju looks less like a launch-week spike and more like a two-tier market: raw base settling, gems and one-of-ones holding the premium.
Kaiju across the market
Sources: eBay, Goldin, Card Ladder sales history, Topps pack odds.
Before the hobby sees the October Premier catalog, you do. Headlining next month: Shohei Ohtani's 2025 Topps Dynasty Black MLB Logoman Patch Autograph, a one-of-one graded PSA 9, gold ink over the full Logoman, dated October 17, 2025, the night he hit three home runs and struck out ten in the same postseason game.
Ohtani's Logoman cards have set the pace for the modern market all year. This one arrives at Fanatics Collect in October. Consider this your head start.
Fanatics Collect October Premier Auction · Image: Fanatics Collect
The chase above all others: one player's three definitive one-of-ones, the Bowman Chrome 1st Superfractor Autograph, the Topps Chrome Rookie Superfractor Autograph, and the Rookie Debut Patch Autograph. Prove you hold all three and Topps makes a fourth card that exists nowhere else, a 1/1 Three Kings Superfractor signed and inscribed to you.
It has been done. Collector Eric Mandelkern was the first to hold all three of Jackson Chourio's grails, then did it again for Junior Caminero, whose card, inscribed “to Kern the King!”, was handed over at a Rays game. Every other throne in the game is still open.
Watch: the first Three Kings cardThis section is dedicated to iconic cards still hiding in packs. Each edition, we highlight one card that has yet to be pulled.
“If baseball doesn't work out there's always football.”
Tom Brady, in a Montreal Expos uniform. The Expos really did draft him, in the 18th round in 1995, before he chose Michigan and the rest became history. He hard-signed 81 cards for the product, but only one Gold Refractor carries that inscription in his own hand: the copy numbered 12/50, matching the jersey number he wore for 23 seasons. It has never surfaced. The uninscribed Superfractor sold at auction for $158,600; this card is still sealed somewhere, waiting for the collector who pulls the greatest what-if in sports.
In the Wild
When Topps Chrome Update Basketball arrived on August 6, it carried the most chased card in the sport: Cooper Flagg's one-of-one Rookie Debut Patch Autograph, the card he signed in person at Fanatics Fest. The bounties came before a single pack was opened. The Mavericks offered 32 years of season tickets to bring it to Dallas, a collector publicly pledged $2 million, and offers eventually climbed past $3 million, sight unseen.
Five days later, on a live break at RhodyBreakers in Rhode Island, the card came out of a pack on camera. It was hit by Jason Williams, a 50-year-old collector from South Carolina who had bought his spot in the break for $515. “They slid that card over and I just slid to the floor crying,” he told ESPN afterward.
With millions already on the table, Williams said the money was not the point. What mattered, he told The Athletic, were the experiences the card would bring his family: the things his kids would get to see that most people never do. Six weeks later the card crossed the block in the Fanatics Collect September Premier Auction and sold for $8.04 million, the most ever paid for a Debut Patch. A $515 seat in a break became the biggest sale in Fanatics Collect history.
Watch: Kevin Negandhi's report on the pull
Plenty of players sign cards. Fewer collect them. Jac Caglianone, the sixth pick in the 2024 draft and the Royals' two-way slugger out of Florida, is one of the few: he chases his own cards, trades for his teammates', and keeps a running want list like any other collector. At the top of that list, for a long time, sat a single card: a one-of-one of himself.
Last summer a hobby shop in Birmingham, Alabama, pulled his 2025 Bowman Chrome Superfractor and posted it online. Teammate Nick Loftin, another collector, saw it first and connected the two sides. The deal was set for Kauffman Stadium, then moved to Omaha when Caglianone was sent down for a rehab stint. The shop owner rebooked flights, rented a car, and drove in to meet him at Werner Park. In return for the card, Caglianone handed over a signed game-worn jersey, game-used bats, balls, and an afternoon the shop will not forget. “This is my grail now,” he told them.
The Topps side of his collection keeps growing on its own. This spring, after his 403-foot home run helped Italy beat Team USA at the World Baseball Classic, Topps Now issued a one-of-one autographed card of the swing, signed with a single word of inscription: Fuhgeddaboudit. Somewhere, a collector holds that one. He would like a word.
Watch: inside Jac's collection on 1-of-1
NFL stars and college prospects in one Bowman release for the first time, September 30
A collection has a life: the pack ripped on release day, the card sent off for grading, the grail finally won at auction, the pull you watched happen live at midnight. What used to take five companies now lives in one place.
Making cards for seventy-five years, across baseball, football, basketball, soccer, entertainment, and beyond.
Where collectors gather to open packs together, in real time.
Where collections are vaulted, bought, and sold, with care.
Topps Iconic
One iconic set from 75 years of Topps, examined up close.
Shop Talk
A visit with one of our hobby shop partners.
Fanatics Collectibles Global
Dispatches from the hobby abroad.
Fanatics Collectibles
Built for our most loyal collectors.
That's not it. Check your invitation.
