The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle is the card that defines the entire hobby — postwar America's biggest baseball star, at the peak of the sport's cultural dominance, on cardboard that most kids simply threw away.
When this near-mint copy sold for $12.6 million in August 2022, it obliterated the previous sports-card record and became a symbol of the pandemic-era collecting boom, when bored money flooded into cardboard as a genuine investment class.
Ad space