The checklist has a mixed history as a card.
For many years, it was either essential or completely irrelevant.
Before the 1980s, getting a checklist in a pack instead of a player card, while understandably disappointing, was needed to find out how many cards collectors needed to complete the team set or the whole set. Kids would take a pen or pencil and do something they would never do to any other card: write on it. Price guides changed that and even later, the Internet.
The checklist became unnecessary.
But checklists are now breathing a new life.
Having been written on and likely discarded more than other cards, those who want to collect full graded sets are now having to spend big money on checklists.
Prior to this year, the most coveted checklist was the 1986 Fleer Basketball checklist in a gem mint PSA 10, mostly because of the number of people looking to finish that entire set in that condition. The 1986 Fleer checklist in a 10 started selling in 2016 for $8,000 to $10,000. Today, the checklist with the most gem 10s (89) sells in the $5,000 range.
But other checklists also are getting significant attention.
In August, Heritage set a checklist record by selling a 1971 Topps Baseball checklist (cards 264-393) with an orange helmet for a whopping $23,400. The orange helmet version has been graded 244 times. Only two have ever graded at PSA 10. So, is the buyer collecting the set, or perhaps only the checklist?
"The set is just incredibly hard to get a 10, so it's unlikely that the purchaser is truly optimistic about collecting the set," said Ryan Stuczynski of GemRate, an analytics company that monitors the percentage of cards graded as gem mint. "Only 190 of the 752 cards even have a gem-mint copy that has been graded."
This past weekend, a 1975 Topps Baseball checklist (cards 1-132) sold for $10,200 at Heritage. Of 302 graded, there are only two PSA 10s. Interestingly, a checklist from the same set (cards 397-528) sold for only $348. Out of a total of 348 graded, there are 10 PSA 10s of that card.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.