A Jordan Insert Sold for $635 and $6,800

Two PSA 10 copies of the 1996-97 Topps Season's Best Jordan closed within $300 of each other Thursday. A raw copy drew 44 bids and made $635.

Two PSA 10 copies of the 1996-97 Topps Season’s Best En Fuego #1 Michael Jordan closed on eBay Thursday, at $6,800.00 and $6,500.00. An ungraded copy of the same card, bid up by 44 people, brought $635.00.

Why it matters

A single graded sale tells you what one bidder would pay. Two tell you where the market is. The 1996-97 Topps Season’s Best Jordan produced both on the same day, which makes the 10.71x gap to the raw copy a measurement rather than an anecdote. Most of that gap is the grade itself, which is what a PSA 10 is supposed to be worth — this is the price of certainty, not a mispricing anyone missed. More card sales coverage.

By the numbers

• 10.71x — the spread between the PSA 10 and the ungraded copy, the widest of the 6 comparisons that cleared Thursday.
• $6,165.00 — the dollar gap, also the day’s widest.
• 44 bids — on the $635.00 raw copy, more than the 31 the $6,800.00 PSA 10 drew. The cheap side was not short of bidders.

Zoom in

The two PSA 10s are the useful part. One closed at $6,800.00 on 31 bids, the other at $6,500.00 on 54 bids — 1.05x apart, in two separate auctions, on one day. Our spread thresholds reject that comparison as too narrow to be a story, and that is exactly what makes it worth reading: when two independent rooms of bidders land that close, the number they land on is a real one.

Reality check

5 of Thursday’s 6 comparisons had both sides bid up in open auctions. The exception is the 1997-98 Metal Universe #23, where the $1,100.00 SGC 8.5 drew no bids at all — that is an asking price someone accepted, not a price the market set, and the 2.76x on that row should be read as the weakest number in the table. The most contested sale of the day was not a graded card at all: an ungraded 1987-88 Fleer Stickers #2 Jordan took 73 bids to reach $446.00. We ran the same comparison on September 30.

How we track this

RazMania compares completed eBay sales of the same card that closed on the same day. Two sales are treated as the same card only when the player, year, set, card number, parallel or photo variation, print-run serial, autograph status and altered status all match — so a Refractor is never compared against a base card. Best Offer sales are excluded entirely, because eBay publishes the seller’s asking price on those and never the settled figure; every price here is a confirmed paid price. Multi-card lots, reprints and customs are filtered out. We quote no comparable-sales median and no 90-day pool — both prices in every comparison closed on the same day. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.