Any product · #1 sweet spot for investing · about a year
Numbered /99 Auto, filed under parallels. Scored on four axes, because a type that gains value but can't be sold quickly is a different proposition from one you can move in a weekend.
Appreciation 84 with liquidity 78 is the combination worth looking for: room left to run, and a market deep enough that you could act on a change of mind. It's also the combination that attracts the most competition, which is usually why accessibility is the score that suffers.
Accessibility of 35 is the catch. That score tracks whether you can buy near MSRP or you're already paying a premium to someone else, and at 35 you are paying up. A card with real upside bought at double MSRP is a worse purchase than an ordinary one bought at retail.
Set against the 12 parallel card types scored here, its appreciation of 84 ranks 7th of 12, liquidity 78 ranks 5th, accessibility 35 ranks 7th, and risk 28 is the 3rd-lowest. The closest thing to it on the numbers is Bowman Sapphire, which scores 80 and 65 on the same two axes — if you're weighing one against the other, the difference is in the reasoning rather than the scores.
A one-year horizon means you're betting on a single body of work — one season, essentially. That's a much narrower bet than a career, and it should be sized like one.
Risk is scored 28, toward the low end of anything in the tool. Low risk in trading cards is still not low risk in any sense your bank would recognise — it means the identifiable ways for this to go wrong are fewer, not that they're absent.
Every entry gets four separate scores instead of one grade, because a single grade hides the thing you needed. Full explanation in the guide: what Kabooms, Downtowns and Color Blasts are worth.
Or browse all card types · how these scores are built