Honus Wagner T206 baseball card sets new record as most valuable

For now, the iconic Honus Wagner T206 baseball card is back at the top of the sports card world

Earlier this year, a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle PSA 9 baseball card and a 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite Lebron James rookie card BGS 9 each sold for $5.2 million, establishing new benchmarks for the highest confirmed sales of individual sports cards. Now, after previously holding that distinction, Honus Wagner’s T206 card is back at the top of the charts.

In REA’s auction ending this weekend, an SGC 3 Wagner sold for a record-breaking $6.6 million, besting the sales of each of those previous two cards by more than $1 million.

With soaring prices for sports cards showing no end in sight, it appears as if it is only a matter of time before the record is broken yet again — by another Wagner or one of the 1952 Topps graded PSA 10 cards of Mickey Mantle, which would almost certainly top the current mark, should one ever happen.

It should be noted that a Babe Ruth 1914 minor league baseball card was reportedly sold for around $6 million back in June. But an exact sum was not yet confirmed, to my knowledge.

As I’ve mentioned before, pound for pound, the Wagner is the most valuable card in the world. There is little doubt that a PSA 10 Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps card would eclipse Wagner’s current mark. Even other modern cards could challenge the record. However, this Wagner is graded only a 3. The Mantle 1952 Topps card, for example, in that grade comes nowhere close to the kind of prices you see for even lower-grade Wagner cards.

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