re: Forget the lottery, check your baseball cards: Mickey Mantle rookie card sells for $5.2M!

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why would MT card be so high?

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Cards from the old days are valuable because they are rare, especially if they are still in mint condition. They didn't make as many back then plus the centering and ink consistency was all over the place due to mediocre printing techniques. Plus kids would put them in their bike spokes or bend them up, etc. The ultimate force, however, was angry moms who threw them away when cleaning out their kid's rooms.

As collecting became more popular, card companies produced way more cards and kids (and even their parents) became better at preserving the cards in the hopes that they might become more valuable just like the cards from the old days. The phenomenon peaked into a dutch tulip craze in the late 80s - early 90s. If you were a kid back then, you probably remember it.

But those modern cards are now worthless because they were massively overproduced and perfectly printed with laser techniques. There is nothing rare or special about them. The card companies realized that a big segment of their market was the "investment" collector so they started creating artificial rarity by printing a small, limited number of star player cards or special edition cards - essentially lottery tickets slipped into packs. There's probably a bunch of fraud involved, just like the McDonalds Monopoly Game.