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

My uncle was married to his aunt a long time ago. No cards though, dammit.

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What about a one that's all bent to shite?

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Probably very little. It must be 1st edition stamped

Psa 1 charizard

As you can see even a “1” grade isn’t that bad of condition.

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My uncle was married to his aunt a long time ago.

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That is an odd sentence. I know what you mean, but it took me a second.

I have two or three Mantle cards, but from later in his career, that were given to me by my dad.

I had an original 8x10 photograph of Mantle from 1951, wearing uniform number 6. I gave it away to a friend Yankee collector as a gift. He was sent down to the minors, and Bobby Brown returned to the Yankees from military service and resumed wearing his number 6 from prior four years with the club. When Mantle was called back up he was then assigned number 7, which coincidentally was Brown's original first number in 1946. Brown's Yankee uniform is framed on the wall of the Tulane Institute of Sports Medicine on their campus where he became a doctor.

What’s with the quotations? Don’t think cards are a worthy investment?

I couldn’t imagine being a more seasoned fella who possibly had that card at one time in my youth and either made it the motor on my spoke bike or traded it for a pack of bubble gum

That said, I still have every binder of cards I collected in my youth and a shoebox of comics

Including the biggest rip off of all time, The Death of Superman Series.

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1952 was the first Topps baseball card set

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True. But the 51 Bowman was the first baseball card of Mickey Mantle. The 1952 Topps is best described as a second year. Topps with the bigger size had better appeal, but the 51, 52, and 53 Bowman Mantles are some of the best baseball cards produced.

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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.