Four of the Ten Hardest Cards in This Set Are Commons

Michael Jordan's rookie card is the hardest card in the 1986-87 Fleer set to find in PSA 10. Dominique Wilkins is second by one hundredth of a percentage point. And four of the ten hardest are commons nobody chases.

We ranked all 132 cards by gem rate - PSA 10s as a share of everything PSA has graded of that card - from the population report read on 27 August 2026. Here is what came out.

The ten hardest

Michael Jordan at 57 gems at 1.19 per cent, 335 tens from 28,151 graded. Dominique Wilkins at 121 does 1.20, with 94 from 7,820. Larry Bird at 9 does 1.50. Johnny Moore at 76 does 1.54. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at 1 does 1.59. Patrick Ewing at 32 does 1.63. Chris Mullin at 77 does 1.80. Charles Barkley at 7 does 1.97. Jeff Malone at 67 does 1.98. And the checklist card at 132 does 2.02.

Across the whole set the figure is 4.23 per cent, and the median card sits at 4.73. So every card on that list is between two and four times harder than a typical card from the same packs.

The ten easiest

Andrew Toney at 114 gems at 8.56 per cent. Phil Hubbard at 48 does 8.41, Melvin Turpin at 116 does 8.25, Derek Smith at 103 does 8.22, Michael Cooper at 17 does 7.98, Rory Sparrow at 105 does 7.97, Wayne Rollins at 94 does 7.91, Herb Williams at 125 does 7.78, Reggie Theus at 108 does 7.62 and Jack Sikma at 102 does 7.61.

Andrew Toney is seven times likelier to come back a ten than Michael Jordan, off the same sheets, out of the same packs, in the same year.

Four of the hardest ten are commons

That is the part worth stopping on. Johnny Moore, Chris Mullin, Jeff Malone and the checklist card are all in the top ten, and none of them is a card anyone builds a collection around.

Meanwhile the ten easiest are all commons too. So "hard to gem" is not a property of famous cards, and being a common does not make a card easy.

The sheet does not explain it

The usual explanation offered for a spread like this is printing position. The 132 cards were laid out on a sheet, every card appeared once per sheet in a fixed spot, and cards near the edges took more punishment. If that were driving the gem rates, position would predict them.

We tested it. Arranging the checklist as an eleven-wide grid, the average gem rate by column runs from 3.65 to 6.52 per cent - a spread that looks like something until you arrange the same cards twelve wide, where it flattens to 4.45 against 5.50.

Two different assumptions about the sheet give two different answers, which is what noise looks like. Nobody has published the actual layout, so the explanation cannot be tested properly and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Submission volume explains a good deal of it

Something else does line up.

Across the 132 cards, the correlation between how often a card has been submitted and how often it gems is minus 0.40. The more a card is graded, the worse it grades.

The fifteen most-submitted cards in the set - everything above six thousand copies - gem at an average of 2.36 per cent. The hundred and two cards under 3,200 submissions average 5.35.

The mechanism is not mysterious. When a card is worth grading, people send everything, including the marginal copies. When a card is worth eight dollars in a PSA 10, only the ones that look perfect are worth the fee. A gem rate measures what people chose to submit at least as much as it measures what survived.

That accounts for the Jordan at 1.19 and it accounts for the easiest cards in the set. It does not fully account for Jeff Malone, who has been graded 3,377 times - not far off the easiest cards - and still gems at 1.98.

What this ranking is not

It is a reading on one day. The Jordan at 1.19 and the Wilkins at 1.20 are separated by one hundredth of a percentage point, which is a handful of submissions either way. Treat the top two as a tie and the top six as a group.

It is also PSA only. Beckett, SGC and CGC award tens at completely different rates, and on the Ewing Beckett has awarded exactly one in 2,193 copies against PSA's 162 in 9,921. A gem rate is a fact about a grading company applied to a card, not a property of the card.

And it says nothing about price. Andrew Toney gems seven times more readily than the Jordan and a PSA 10 of his card costs a rounding error by comparison. Difficulty and value are different questions, and only one of them is in this table.

The set is at 1986-87 Fleer, and we have written up nine of the cards in it - including six of the ten hardest.

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