Why A 35 Year-Old American Flag Card Is the Hottest Thing in Collecting

Why A 35 Year-Old American Flag Card Is the Hottest Thing in Collecting

Friday night at around 5 p.m., I caved and bought a 1991 Score American Flag card (#737). It was $7.49 with shipping. A day earlier, when I first considered it, I could’ve had it for $4 total. As of this writing, they are selling for $14.

I didn’t buy it out of a sense of patriotism or some nostalgia kick – I did it because Joe at StakX (unfortunately not one of the 4000 companies with an “x” in their name at The Hobby Awards) started a thread on twitter trying to get people to buy the card and run up its price… just for fun.

If J.R. Fickle is down for nothing else, it’s a bit of cheap “comps” chaos. Here’s how it started:

Here’s when I decided to jump in on the fun:

And here is where we stand as of publication time, while we wait on Luke Combs to come through:

There was no real point to this, as far as I could tell, outside of just spending $7.50 for some entertainment and getting a card that is otherwise sort of pointless in the grand scheme of things.

So, as we like to do here, we just sent a note to Joe… and asked him.

“I saw someone post about the 1991 Score cards doing $200 in PSA 10,” he says. “I bought two to try and grade, then made a post about how I was going to Kabuto King them. At this point, I was entirely joking, I mean there were 4 million of them printed… no way right?”

And then it became – for those of you unfamiliar with the Kabuto King reference – almost like a cards version of the GameStop stock run. People wanted in. Why wouldn’t you??

“I was just doing a bit,” Joe explains. “At least I thought I was. Then things got weird. People started buying – 210 left… 170 Left… 140 left…. “

This number will always be in flux, of course, but as of Monday, there were only 83 left selling on eBay.

“This is when it stopped being a joke, and started becoming a social experiment,” Joe says. “We’re here now… might as well see how far we can push this.”

When the card comes I’ll put it in a tub, and in five years remember that time Joe at StakX – whose step-brother is a submariner, and his grandfather helped develop the first downward-facing ejection seat for airplanes at Wright Patterson – decided to move a market just for fun.

In other words, the card has meaning now, whereas it was just a forgotten piece of junk wax history a week ago.

This is why we do it, right?

Actually, we do it for the tomfoolery AND charity. Joe’s now flipped it to raise some money for Sigs4Soldiers, which is as good and pure an organization as there is:

If anyone out there reading this has some way to get some of these cards autographed by anyone remotely famous and want to elevate the fun of it all… hit up Joe!!

In our very first Mail Day, we suggested you invest in Lauren Betts cards. And then we brought it up a little more forcefully last January as UCLA took aim at the 2025 NCAA tourney.

This is just a PSA to now sell all your Lauren Betts cards, as they have gone sky-high after UCLA won the tourney and she was named MVP.

Relatedly, this could be a “moment” for Bowman U, as almost all of Betts’ cards are from that line. I still believe most non-baseball Bowman 1sts are hugely undervalued, and when things like this happen, people are going to be retroactively looking for them… especially if they’re the only card that exists of that player.

One last word from our pal Joe, as we part on warm and fuzzy feelings:

“I’m blown away by the response and the community coming together to do something, even if it’s silly.”