Market Update #4: LeBron James Cards Are Going Crazy
LeBron and Mason Miller are surging, Ohtani has finally cooled off, and eBay has a week of outages.
It was another interesting week in the card world. eBay was experiencing outages throughout the week (we still can’t make offers on some cards). Pokémon Ascended Heroes were our most bought cards by a lot, while we continue buying plenty of Victor Wembanyama and Shohei Ohtani.
Meanwhile, athletes young and old have seen their markets surge lately: LeBron James, Mason Miller, and George Lombard Jr. have each seen their markets rise more than 60% over the last week, while Kon Knueppel cards have completely tanked.
We’ll break it all down below.
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Cards We’re Buying
Pokémon Ascended Heroes: Just like last week, we continue to buy tons of Ascended Heroes cards. We’ve leaned into these cards at all price points, anywhere from $70 to $1,500, and in both Japanese and English. Well over 50% of our purchase volume this week came from these cards.
Shohei Ohtani: We’ve slowed down our Ohtani buys the last couple weeks, but we certainly haven’t stopped. Ohtani remains the most relevant athlete in the hobby right now.
Victor Wembanyama: Wemby is still one of the most profitable cards to grade based on Expected Value. But we’re finding that nearly every 2023 Prizm Wemby rookie card we’ve bought has been completely ungradeable (despite looking clean in the listings). Are all the good ones already graded? We’re continuing to buy these, so I guess we’ll find out soon.
Konnor Griffin: The future of the Pirates (alongside Paul Skenes) has fallen in value over the last couple months, as he’s had a slow start since getting called up to the bigs. But, many of his cards are still profitable to grade right now, and he’s been warming up at the plate. We’re looking to buy more.
2025 Downtown Football: Downtown cards are down as well over the last 2 months, but many are still strong buys based on Expected Value. Expect a market update on these sometime next week.
BCG Auctions Tracker
The BCG Auction Tracker is an eBay search filter we use to find cards that are profitable to grade. We made some major changes this week.
The biggest update: we found a way to make searches with unlimited characters, which gives us even more flexibility to target exactly what we want. We’re now looking for all the top athletes — rookies and non-rookies — plus all Pokémon, and we’ve added sets like All Kings, All Aces, Downtown, Kaboom, and Color Blast to the search.
We also lowered the minimum price threshold to catch cheaper Ascended Heroes cards we’re targeting, including Dragonite, Gengar, and Psyduck cards.
These are some major changes, so definitely check back next week to see which changes we end up keeping. As a reminder, you can always find the most updated version of the tool here.
But for now, you can try the BCG Auctions Tracker at the link below!
2025 Bowman Chrome Basketball Releases
The new Bowman Chrome Basketball product released on April 22nd, and given that it’s Topps’s first year of regaining basketball licensing, it will be interesting to keep an eye on this. So far I’m seeing lots of auto cards and high value case hits like Anime and Spotlight, which is great for grading.
The biggest variable will be the Gem Rate of the set, as the higher the Gem Rate is, the better the product is for profitable grading (usually). We’ll continue to monitor this, but it will be at least another 2 months before we start buying these cards.
PSA Vault Wants Your Cards
PSA Vault has been making some aggressive Partner Offers lately. Generally speaking, these offers tend to be very inconsistent. For months at a time, we’ll sell thousands of dollars of cards to PSA each month. And then in other months, we’ll sell them absolutely nothing. Our strategy never changes, it just depends on how close to market comps they’re willing to pay. And lately, they’ve made a lot of strong offers.
As another side note, PSA offers seem to be algorithmic, and they also tend to change. If you have offers from PSA, I recommend checking them every 6 hours or so to see if you get anything good.
eBay Outages Shake Card World
eBay suffered outages through the week. This actually caused a lot of problems for us. We missed purchases because we couldn’t get through checkout, and even had points in time where we couldn’t access the webpage at all.
It got so bad that eBay even let sellers cancel auction sales that occurred during the impacted period (you can read their announcement here).
In all honesty, my biggest takeaway here is that it’s amazing that this is the first major eBay outage I’ve seen in a decade of selling there. Hopefully we won’t see another one for a long time.
Risers & Fallers
2003 LeBron James Topps #221 PSA 10
Notes: With all the young talent currently in the NBA playoffs, it’s shocking that LeBron James is one of the biggest risers so far. LeBron’s cards are surging after his dominant series against the Rockets, although they’ve been rising for a few months now. This is still a pretty stunning move for a player who is already established as (at worst) a top 3 player of all time.
2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani #150
Notes: Shohei Ohtani’s rapid ascent has finally slowed (at least for now). His Topps Chrome Pitching rookie card is actually down over the last 14 days, in spite of his strong start to the season, where he’s been especially dominant on the mound. This is a huge change, as for pretty much the entire offseason and early regular season, Ohtani cards had been rising rapidly.
2025 Topps Chrome Kon Knueppel Refractor #254
Notes: Kon Knueppel’s market has completely collapsed over the last 2 months, falling by about 65%. This makes some sense, this is a fairly new product, and as new products get graded and sold, they often fall in value. However, this fall feels particularly extreme. I can’t help but think this is more of a market correction, as the hobby assesses how high Knueppel’s upside truly is, and whether or not he has the potential to become an All NBA level player.
2022 Topps Chrome Cal Raleigh Rookie Auto #RA-CR
Note: While this graph is based on just a handful of sales, I can confirm through having quite a few Cal Raleigh cards for sale over the last few months that his market fall is real. Raleigh has had a slow start to the season, hitting just .186 over his first 33 games. We will see if he can regain the MVP-caliber form he had last year, but another 60 home run season is highly unlikely at this point.
2021 Bowman Chrome Mason Miller 1st Auto #CA-MMIL
Notes: Mason Miller’s scoreless streak is over, but don’t tell the market that. Jokes aside, Miller has been absolutely dominant this season, pitching to a 1.17 ERA while striking out 53.7% of batters he’s faced. Still, this pricing seems astronomical for a relief pitching who’s thrown just 175 career innings at 27 years old (but that won’t stop us from buying to grade if the price is right).
2024 Bowman Chrome George Lombard 1st Auto #CPA-GLO
Notes: The Yankees top prospect recently got the call to AAA, after slashing .312/.400/.571 with the AA squad. His market is seeing a nice bump in response, as the hobby anticipates his call to the majors.