- We picked players based on real hardware — an MVP, a championship, sustained All-NBA recognition, or undeniable current dominance.
- We only use each player's flagship base rookie card — no inserts, parallels, or numbered variants.
- Every card needs enough graded copies in circulation to trade in real volume, not just a handful of trophy sales.
- We also require a large, established card market overall — which is why some good, well-known players aren't on this list yet.
If you've read our flagship piece on the market, you've seen us refer to a working list of ten cards over and over. This is where that list comes from, and why it's these ten and not others.
The players
We looked for a real case that someone belongs among the best the league has produced recently: an MVP or a championship, a sustained run of All-NBA recognition over several seasons, or simply being undeniably one of the best players in the league right now. Most of the names on this list clear that bar several times over.
A couple of names were included on a slightly different basis. Anthony Edwards and Victor Wembanyama hadn't fully cleared the same bar at the time we built this list, but both showed a clear trajectory toward it — waiting for the hardware to catch up to the obvious talent would have meant missing the period when their cards were most worth talking about.
The cards
We kept this side simple on purpose: each player's flagship rookie card, the base version, not an insert, parallel, or serial-numbered variant. That's the version with enough copies in circulation to actually trade in meaningful volume, which matters for everything we write about these cards.
We also set a liquidity floor: a card needs roughly a thousand or more professionally graded copies in existence before we'll use it, specifically so we're looking at a real, tradable market rather than a handful of trophy sales setting the price for everyone watching. For two of the older cards — LeBron's and Curry's — that's also why we use a PSA 9 instead of a PSA 10: at the highest grade, those particular cards don't change hands often enough for the price to mean much, while PSA 9 copies of the same card trade with enough frequency to actually tell you something.
The market-size cutoff — and who it leaves out
Finally, we looked at the overall size of each player's card market — not just one card's price, but the total value of everything tied to that player, using third-party market data — and set a cutoff there too, to separate players with a genuinely large, established card market from players who are good but whose card market hasn't caught up yet.
That's the reason a few well-known names — Jalen Brunson, Cade Cunningham, and Donovan Mitchell among them — aren't part of this set. It isn't a judgment on how good they are as players. Their card markets are real; they just aren't yet at the scale of the ten we're using here. We revisit this list periodically, and it's entirely possible some of these names join it later.
The list
That's the working set behind everything we publish here. It isn't fixed forever — we revisit it periodically against the same criteria above, and it'll change if and when someone's career or card market earns a spot.