Sketch Card Royalty

An Armada is a fleet of warships. Transformers Armada is the last sketch card set from trading card manufacturer Fleer (released in 2003) before they began their bankruptcy selloff. [Here’s one of my old blog posts about the Fleer bankruptcy]. — Last month a Transformers Armada sketchagraph card came up for sale. What makes this so interesting? According to the text on the back side of the card, no more than 50 copies exist, making this one of the very rarest sketch cards ever made.

What makes this card even more scarce is that it was only available by redemption, and very few sketchagraphs were redeemed before Fleer’s bankruptcy selloff. I’d guess that less than 10 copies were sent to collectors before Fleer closed their doors. So what happened to the rest? Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s safe to assume they were sold as one lot to a single bidder at the bankruptcy auction. A person in attendance at the auction shares, “you had to bid on entire rooms full of stuff, not just individual items.” — So there’s a good chance the owner doesn’t even know what they are. The owner might have just acquired them as a small part of a larger purchase. But a known and released copy recently went up for auction on eBay, twenty years after it was first redeemed …

31 bids later, the auction ended at $942. — I think the price might have even gone higher if the auction was titled correctly (either “sketchagraph” singular, or “sketch card”‘). This might not be the highest priced sketch card sale this year, but it is almost certainly the most rare.

In this hobby. you might only see a collectible come to auction once. I’m constantly surprised how many trading cards go into personal collections and are never seen again. This is a white whale, and Ahab-collectors might be chasing a copy for another twenty years. Happy Collecting!