Sports Cards That Can Be Bought For $1,000 Back In 2016 (And Then Cards That Can Be Bought For $1,000 in 2026)

You're listening to Cards to the Moon, a podcast about trading cards from both a collector and investor perspective. We hope you'll stick around for the ride as we take a deep dive into the state of the hobby, share some hot takes, hopefully some useful advice and fun stories along the way. Alright, welcome back to Cards to the Moon. This is another Friday episode and it is episode number 345. My name is Clark from 5cardguys.com. You can also find me at 5cardguys on Instagram, YouTube and on Facebook. It's going to be another solo episode from me so it'll be another shorty but hopefully a goody for you guys and I hope this one will be a little bit more entertaining for you because I just saw a meme on social media and I'm probably late to the game but it's that meme where people are posting a picture of themselves from 10 years ago in 2016 and I don't entirely get it but in that vein, I thought this episode, what I would do is kind of play on that, okay? So what I did was I researched about a list of 10 cards, 10 sports cards that you can get for $1,000 back in 2016 and I did make some stipulations on which cards I was looking for specifically and they had to be a rookie card, an autograph rookie card and also in a PSA 10 gem mint condition, okay? So that's the filter I used and it's actually pretty eye-opening what you could have gotten for $1,000 back in 2016 and what I'm going to do afterwards is give you another list of 10 sports cards that you can get for $1,000 in 2026 and I know we're only one month in but I still got a list of 10 cards from 2026 that cost $1,000 so stay tuned for that but let's start with what you could have gotten for $1,000 in 2016, all right? So first, I'll start with basketball. You could have gotten the 2009 Playoff Contenders Rookie Autograph Card in a PSA 10 of Stephen Curry for about $1,000, all right? You could have also gotten a 2007 SP Authentic Rookie Autograph Card numbered at $399 of Kevin Durant which is crazy but not all cards can go up over time and this is a good lesson for all of us. You could have, if you were unlucky, picked up for $1,000 the 2014 National Treasures Rookie Patch Auto numbered to $99 of Jabari Parker, all right? So I think when I checked up on Card Ladder, it last sold five, six years ago so not a lot of sales of Jabari Parker lately but five or six years ago, it was about $600, $650 so I'm sure it's a bit lower today, probably 50% now, just my guess. All right, moving on to baseball, you could have gotten the 2014 Bowman Chrome Black Refractor Rookie Autograph Card numbered to $99 of Mookie Betts again in a PSA 10 or you could have picked up a 2006 Bowman Chrome Draft Rookie Autograph Card in a PSA 10 of Clayton Kershaw who recently retired from the LA Dodgers. So you would have done well if you picked up either of those two cards 10 years ago. All right, moving on to hockey which is, I don't know if this is a Canadian bias but I thought this was extraordinary that you could have picked up for $1,000 the 2015 SP Authentic Future Watch Rookie Auto numbered to $999 of Connor McDavid which I'm always looking to pick up in a BGS 9.5 because I think that's better value but it's still thousands of dollars now. But you could have gotten a PSA 10 for $1,000 and staying with the SP Authentic Future Watch Autograph Cards, again numbered to $999, you could have picked one up 2005 SP Authentic of Sidney Crosby. So that's something I'm sure my co-host John would have wished he had done back in 2016. Just to wrap up this 2016 section with football cards, you could have picked up the 2005 Exquisite Collection Debut Rookie Autograph Card numbered to 25 of Aaron Rodgers. I'm sure that's gone up since then. Or you could have, again, struck out if you picked up the 2016 Panini Contenders Rookie Autograph Card of Carson Wentz, that was $1,000 back then. Or 2015 National Treasures Rookie Patch Auto numbered to $99 of Marcus Mariota. Again you probably didn't make much if at all with the last two cards I just mentioned. Alright so I thought that was a little bit eye opening to see how much the hobby has grown and how the value of some of these cards has skyrocketed in the last decade. Now let's compare to what the hobby is like in 2026 and what that $1,000 can get you in today's market. We'll start with basketball again and if you had $1,000 you could pick up a 2012 National Treasures Rookie Autograph Card numbered to $99 of Draymond Green. So that's what you can do for $1,000. You could also pick up, I think this is better value, 2022 Bowman University Best Rookie Autograph Card PSA 10 of Kaitlyn Clark. I think that probably has better legs in my opinion, but we'll see. Let's move on to baseball. You could get a 2024 Bowman Chrome Blue Refractor numbered to $150 Blue Refractor Autograph Rookie Card of Pete Crow Armstrong. So that's not too bad. You could also get a 2022 Topps Chrome Red Refractor. Wow, Red Refractor numbered to $5 of C.J. Abrams, but it's the Ben Baller Topps Chrome Edition. So that's probably why it's not worth more than $1,000. If it was a regular Red Refractor Topps Chrome, definitely you're going to pay more. And I got one more for baseball. You could get the 2024 Topps Chrome Update Sapphire Gold Rookie Autograph Card numbered to $50 of Jackson Holliday. So the jury's still out on Jackson Holliday, he's still young, so that might not be a bad card to pick up if you want to take that risk. All right, let's move on to football. And I'm going to save hockey for the end, and I'll explain why. But for football, you could get a 2020 Prism Rookie Patch Auto Purple Power Parallel numbered to $49 of Jordan Love. All right, so that's for $1,000. And for $1,000, 2018 Donruss Optic. This is a Red Autograph Rookie numbered to $50 of Sam Darnold. I wonder if that recent sale is up because of his soon-to-be Super Bowl appearance. And you could also get a 2023 Panini Prism Red Wave numbered to $149 Red Wave Autograph Rookie Card of Puka Nakua. All right, so that's what you can get for $1,000. And why save hockey for the end when I did a quick filter looking for a PSA 10 Rookie Autograph Card, I couldn't find any really in that search. The closest I came for Rookie Autograph is Macklin Celebrini, but that was in a PSA 8 with a 10 Auto. So you could get that for $1,000. But what I did was look for Non-Autograph Rookie Cards of hockey players, and a few showed up. You could get a 2013 Upper Deck Young Guns Rookie Card of Nathan McKinnon, who always seems to be undervalued. Or you could get the 2023-2024 Upper Deck Series 2 Young Guns Rookie Card of Conor Bedard in a PSA 10. And I don't even want to look at what the pop count is on that, but that's also going for $1,000. I think I'd rather have the Nathan McKinnon, but I know there's a lot of Bedard fans out there. So that's interesting to see, right? The $1,000 back in 2016 could have gotten you a Future Watch Autograph Card of either Conor McDavid or Sidney Crosby, versus today you get a Young Guns Non-Autograph Rookie Card of either Nathan McKinnon or Conor Bedard. Hope that was fun for you. I wonder what we're going to be seeing in 2036, 10 years down the road. What $1,000 bucks can get you if the hobby continues to grow as it is. Probably a nice insert card for that amount of money. So that's all I got for you guys today. Tell me if any of the cards I mentioned, whether from the 2016 list or the 2026 list, was surprising to you. But I'm sure after hearing the two lists, we're all thinking, if only we could turn back time. But we can't. So let's start collecting today and hope for the best in the future. All right, we'll have a brand new episode as we usually do on Tuesday. I'll talk to you then. Bye. Bye.