A 1977 Topps Star Wars Card With the Highest Grading Was Almost Beaten at Auction By This Unique 2025 Miles Morales Card

Trading cards have been around for a long time and many sell for thousands if not millions with the right combination of age, scarcity and the need for serious collectors to own that one card no one else has. Sometimes though, the age of a card may not be as much of a pull as the idea of a much more recent release being a once in a lifetime offering. That is what happened during a recent Goldin auction, when the hammer prices of two cards with a near-50 year age gap became almost too close to call. The auction included a 1977 Topps Star Wars Luke Skywalker card with one of the highest grades known to exist, along with a much newer one-of-a-kind 2025 Topps Chrome Marvel SuperFractor card featuring Spider-Man’s Miles Morales. While neither of these cards could compete with some the hundreds of thousands that some Pokemon cards sold for in the same auction, the margin between their respective sales was much closer than you would probably expect.

Star Wars and Marvel are two of the biggest franchises in the world, and that means anything linked to either of them is going to attract a lot of attention. This is true of vintage items from the original Star Wars trilogy and the Golden Age of Marvel Comics, so when the #1 Luke Skywalker card from the original 1977 Topps trading cards set arrives with an incredible MT+ 9.5 SGC grading – one of only two copies ever to achieve that exceptional appraisal – then it is going to sell for a huge amount. That turned out to be $35,380, substantially more than it was purchased for almost 50 years earlier but only $4,000 more than a one-year-old card that should not have probably challenged it in bidding terms.

A Modern Marvel Card That Almost Stole the Show

However, this time it was the attraction of grabbing an extremely rare Marvel card, along with a PSA 8 grading, that helped push the 1/1 Miles Morales card to a similarly impressive $31,720 price. Modern cards usually do not carry the same weight as vintage ones, but in this case the unique nature of the card outweighed its age. To put it in context, despite its quality, the Luke Skywalker card was mass-produced back in 1977 and there are still a lot of them out there in good condition – even a few that have been signed by Mark Hamill over the years. The Miles Morales card is famously impossible to find. The chances of finding it in a value pack stood at around 1 in 125,000, and even in hobby packs those odds were still 1 in over 3000.

This is what makes card collecting one of the most gruelling and torturous hobbies for anyone who gets serious about making their collection the envy of others. Finding the rarest cards in the wild is all down to luck and you need a lot of luck to find a card like Miles Morales from picking up a few packs and hoping to come across it. That, in turn, means that deep pockets are therefore needed to be able to acquire such a card when it comes up at auction or as part of a trade. What also spurs on bidders to pay that little bit more is that once sold, it is unlikely that this card will be available to buy again for a very long time. In years to come, when age adds to its value, this Miles Morales card will likely overtake vintage Star Wars cards and could even be a challenger to some of the biggest trading cards out there.