The number has been everywhere since May: 429 million cards in the 2025-26 Topps Basketball print run, 1.26 million copies of each base card. It gets repeated the way real data gets repeated — flatly, with a "reportedly" bolted on the front, as the settled premise of an argument about whether the hobby has walked back into 1989.
Chase the citation and it stops moving. It terminates at one post: ["Junk Wax 2.0: Is Overproduction Killing the Sports Card Market in 2026?"](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/junk-wax-2-0-overproduction-212736062.html) by Rohit Gupta for Athlon Sports, published May 10, 2026 and syndicated through Yahoo Sports and AOL. Read it directly and both figures are attributed to the piece's own "April 2026 market data." No research firm. No grading company. No manufacturer database. No linked source of any kind.
That matters more than it sounds, because the honest version of this story is stronger than the one being passed around. Modern base cards really are being repriced toward zero. The reason has almost nothing to do with a headline print total nobody can produce.
The number nobody disputes has no author
Start with the structural problem: Topps does not announce print runs for cards without serial numbering. There is no disclosed figure of this kind to report, which means any total in circulation is a back-calculation — someone's arithmetic, presented without the arithmetic.
Then run the check the chain of republication never ran. The verified 2025-26 Topps Basketball base set is 300 cards, released October 23, 2025, per the Checklist Insider product breakdown. Divide 429 million by 1.26 million and you get roughly 340 — a base set size that does not exist.
Push it the other way and it gets worse. At 1.26 million copies each, 300 base cards alone account for 378 million cards. That leaves about 51 million for more than 31 distinct base parallel types, every retail-exclusive variant, and the entire insert lineup across the product. The two numbers cannot both be true. They were not derived from each other, and they do not reconcile after the fact.
A figure that fails its own internal consistency check is not a data point with a wide error bar. It is a guess that has been laundered into a fact by three rounds of syndication.
What is actually verifiable about the 2025-26 print
The published product structure is the part worth reading closely, and it is more interesting than the fake total.
The base set runs 300 cards. Hobby boxes are 12 packs of 20 — 240 cards per box — with one autograph or relic per box, at $109.99 presale and $119.99 on release day. Base cards carry seven unnumbered parallels: Rainbow Foilboard, Holo Foil, and Aqua, Pink, Purple, Blue and Green Holo Foil. Checklist Insider lists these as "unlimited." Alongside them sit 14 serial-numbered tiers — Gold /2,025 at the top, stepping down through Purple Rainbow /250, Blue Rainbow /150, Green Rainbow /99, Black /68, to Red Rainbow /5 — plus three 1/1s. Pack odds are disclosed for some of them (Rainbow Foilboard at 1:11, Gold at 1:87).
Look at where the opacity actually lives. The serial-numbered ladder is fully transparent: a /99 is a /99. The base run is undisclosed but also uncontroversial — nobody buys a base card believing it's scarce. The unnumbered parallels are the only cards in the product manufactured in an undisclosed quantity and marketed on scarcity. Seven color tiers, printed to unstated quantities, sold on the visual grammar of a limited card. If there is a supply story in this product, that is where it is — not in a 429 million total that nobody can support.
Run the 1990s comparison honestly and it embarrasses the meme
The junk wax framing invites a direct comparison, so make it. Chris Rogers' history of the junk wax era at All Vintage Cards estimates at least 2.5 million copies of each card in the 792-card 1987 Topps set — roughly 2 billion cards from one set — and more than a billion Topps cards in 1986, with Donruss and Fleer each running around a third of Topps' volume in 1987.
Take the unsourced 1.26 million at face value and it is roughly half the per-card print of 1987 Topps. For one sport. Against three or more competing printers producing simultaneously in the 1980s.
Rogers is explicit that his numbers are his own estimates, drawing on the NET54 forum rather than manufacturer disclosure — the same caveat that applies to the modern figure. Both ends of this comparison are hobby back-of-envelope. Which is the point: raw volume is not the case for Junk Wax 2.0, and the people making that case loudest are working from two sets of estimates that, if you accept them, argue against them.
Test it against sell-through, which is the part the doom take skips
If the market were collapsing under supply, the demand side should show it. It shows the opposite.
eBay sports-card singles reached $1.36 billion in the first half of 2026, per GemRate data as reported by Athlon Sports on July 31 — up 66.7% from $815.63 million in H1 2025, and up 40% from $967 million in H2 2025. Across all singles categories, including TCG and non-sport, the figure was $2.32 billion, up 57%. More than five million sports cards were submitted for grading in six months.
Attribute that to GemRate rather than to the publisher, and verify it against GemRate's own reporting before you build a position on it. But the direction is not ambiguous: whatever is happening to base cards is happening inside a fast-expanding market. That is a repricing within the category, not a collapse of it — and the distinction changes what a collector should do about it.
The grading desk is where the base card actually dies
Here is the verified evidence the Junk Wax 2.0 argument should have been built on all along.
In January 2025, Sports Illustrated's Clemente Lisi [reported that six of the 12 most-graded modern base rookie cards were worth less in a PSA 10 than the roughly $20 it cost to grade them](https://www.si.com/collectibles/inside-the-hobby/grading-ultra-modern-base-rookie-cards-may-be-a-waste-of-money). A 2020 Topps Series 1 Gavin Lux rookie in a PSA 10 — a perfect grade on a card that thousands of people paid to submit — was worth $4. Collector Chris Sewell put it plainly in that piece: "Half the cards on the list don't even cover the cost of grading a PSA 10."
Since then the gap has widened from both ends. Athlon Sports, citing an April 2026 PSA policy change, puts current grading cost at roughly $25 to $33 per card. Treat that as directional pending confirmation from PSA's own published tiers — but the trend line is not in dispute, and the values on the other side of the equation have not moved up to meet it.
That reframes the real question. It is not whether 1.26 million copies exist. It is that at any current grading tier, a mass-printed base card is a negative-expected-value submission on the gem alone — and that's before you weight it for the probability that the card comes back a 9. You are paying a known fee for an uncertain grade on an asset whose best-case value is already below the fee. No print-run number is required to reach that conclusion, and no correction to the print-run number rescues it.
The bifurcation, with actual numbers
The last real correction shows which cards absorb the damage. Per Sports Illustrated's 2026 vintage preview by David Solow, the Card Ladder CL50 index fell 23% in 2022 and another 9% in 2023. A 2003-04 LeBron James rookie went from around $300,000 to under $50,000.
Through the same window, a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle #253 in PSA 6 rose from $38,000 to $51,000, and a 1950 Bowman Jackie Robinson in PSA 6 held around $6,000. A 1933 Goudey Ruth #144 in PSA 3 slipped from $15,000 to $12,500 — a real decline, and a small one next to what happened to modern.
Submission mix tells the same story from the supply side: roughly 25% of SGC's volume is vintage, against under 10% at PSA. Modern is the pressure point. Low-population vintage is the ballast. That split is the actual shape of the market, and it is visible in graded comps rather than in a print-run rumor.
The monopoly counter-argument, steelmanned
The junk wax analogy fails on structure, not just on volume. The 1990s glut was an arms race among six-plus competing printers, each with a license and a reason to outprint the others. That configuration no longer exists.
Per Fox Business, Fanatics bought Topps in 2022 for roughly $500 million. Topps began NBA card production in October 2025; the NFL license transferred to Topps in April 2026. By April 2026, Fanatics held exclusive licenses across the NBA, NFL, MLB, the Premier League, F1 and WWE.
That cuts both directions, and collectors should hold both. A single licensor can throttle supply in a way six competitors never could — which makes overproduction, if it happens, a deliberate choice with an identifiable decision-maker rather than an unstoppable market dynamic. It also concentrates the decision. There is no competitor to undercut a bad one.
The legal question is open, not closed. On March 24, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in the Southern District of New York dismissed the consumer antitrust class action against Fanatics, the leagues, the players' associations and OneTeam. The dismissal was on standing — no named plaintiff had actually bought cards from the defendants, and the court noted it was "actually impossible" to buy NBA cards from Fanatics before October 2025 — and it was without prejudice. Nothing was decided on the merits. Panini's separate suit against Fanatics continues. Mainstream coverage has picked the story up as well, including a CNBC feature, "How Fanatics cornered the sports collectibles market," published May 22, 2026.
What actually got repriced: "complete the set"
The junk in Junk Wax 2.0 isn't the wax. It's the base card, and specifically the idea that a base card is a unit of collection worth preserving, grading, and eventually selling.
A 300-card set carrying 31-plus parallel tiers — seven of them printed to no stated quantity — was never completable in the sense the phrase used to mean. The hobby quietly stopped pretending otherwise, and the price of raw base cards is what that admission looks like on a comp sheet. That is a genuine structural change. It just isn't the one the 429 million figure claims to describe.
Practically, three things follow. Price grading decisions against the fee, not the narrative: if the PSA 10 comp doesn't clear the submission cost with margin, the card is not a candidate regardless of how many exist. Distinguish undisclosed from unlimited — an unnumbered parallel is opaque, which is a reason for caution, not a reason to assume any specific number. And treat modern base and low-pop vintage as separate markets with separate risk profiles, because the 2022-23 data says they behave that way under stress.
On the number itself: before you repeat a print run, ask who published it. If the answer is a manufacturer, it will be attached to a serial number. If it isn't, ask what the source is; then ask what that source is. Check whether the figure survives division by the verified set size. A number that can't name an author and can't pass its own arithmetic isn't evidence of a bubble. It's just the loudest thing in the room.
Related reading
Sources
-
[Junk Wax 2.0: Is Overproduction Killing the Sports Card Market in 2026?](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/junk-wax-2-0-overproduction-212736062.html) — Rohit Gupta, Athlon Sports, May 10, 2026 (origin of the 429M/1.26M figures; both attributed to the piece's own unsourced "April 2026 market data")
-
2025-26 Topps Basketball Checklist, NBA Set Details, Boxes, Odds — Checklist Insider (300-card base set, parallel ladder, box configuration, pack odds)
-
The Rise and Fall of the Junk Wax Era — Chris Rogers, All Vintage Cards, Oct. 28, 2023 (updated Apr. 13, 2025)
-
eBay's $1.36 Billion Sports Card Half — Rohit Gupta, Athlon Sports, July 31, 2026, citing GemRate data
-
Grading Ultra-Modern Base Rookie Cards May Be A Waste Of Money — Clemente Lisi, Sports Illustrated, Jan. 10, 2025
-
Will Prices Crash? A 2026 Vintage Card Preview — David Solow, Sports Illustrated, Jan. 3, 2026
-
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit claiming Fanatics, pro sports leagues monopolized trading card industry — Fox Business
-
How Fanatics cornered the sports collectibles market — CNBC, May 22, 2026 (cited for the existence, title and date of mainstream coverage)
Note on figures: grading-cost and secondary-market pricing sourced to Athlon Sports is directional. Verify any dollar figure against live sold comps before acting on it.
Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed in our editorial workflow.
DISCLAIMER: PureGrail articles are for informational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing on this site constitutes financial, investment, or legal advice. Collectibles are speculative assets and values can decrease significantly. Always conduct your own research before buying or selling. Past price performance does not indicate future results.
