Lucas Martell thought he had pulled a valuable card. Instead, the 23-year-old and his 18-year-old brother Trevor found a one-of-one Tom Brady card in a $29.99 box of Topps NFL Bowman cards, and it is now set to headline the Fanatics Collect Premier Auction.
The card, catalogued as NFLG-TB, is the Superfractor version of the Bejeweled Brady Garbage Pail Kids card, with a print run of exactly one. That makes the Tom Brady rare football card value a live question for collectors watching the auction, which opened Nov. 5 and runs through Nov. 19.
The pull is extraordinary even by hobby standards. Mathematical estimates put the odds of finding that specific card at one in 10.5 million, and the standard version is an unnumbered Refractor. Scarcer versions exist too, including a Black version numbered to 10 and a Red version numbered to 5, but none carries the same one-of-one appeal as the card Lucas and Trevor found.
That rarity is why the card was shipped to Los Angeles and insured for $350,000 while it waits for bidding to finish. Lucas is set to receive a negotiated payout equal to 115% of the final winning bid, so the brothers’ windfall will rise or fall with the market’s final judgment. No final price has been reported because the auction only opened today, even though collectors are already weighing whether the card could reach hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The comparison points are easy to see and hard to ignore. A similar one-of-one Garbage Pail Kids Superfractor featuring Cooper Flagg sold for $288,000, while a PSA 10 2025 Topps Chrome Tom Brady Kaiju card brought $23,300. Higher up the ladder, a 2000 Fleer Showcase Masterpieces Brady rookie card sold for $396,000, a Beckett-graded Mint 9 2000 Playoff Contenders Championship rookie card set a then-record at $3.1 million in June 2021, and a 2005 Topps Finest Superfractor of Brady sold at Goldin for $704,550.
For Lucas Martell, the card’s journey is already over; for everyone else, the real number comes when the auction closes Nov. 19. That final bid will show whether a card found in a cheap retail box becomes a mid-five-figure curiosity or one of the more expensive Brady pulls ever sold.
