Todd Elik RC BGS 9.5: 1990-91 Upper Deck French Rookie Card Gisto POP 1
Highlights!
This Card is the Gisto and a POP 1
There are No Cards Graded Higher
(as of Jan 2023)
If you love sports, you’ll love our store!
Shipping
This card will be shipped out of our vault in Ontario, Canada. Our shipping prices are for Canada and the United States. All duties and taxes that may apply belong to the governing jurisdiction and we have no control over those. We do ship international, please just message us.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. We take collecting very seriously and will help in any way we can.
About 1st Round:
Our mission is to serve the sports fan with the best selection and variety of their favorite athlete’s Beckett Grading Services cards (BGS), especially if they are hard to find. Today’s hobby focuses on breaks, $1M cards, memes and inaccurate analytics. We don’t.
We know cards and we know sports. Period.
While we first started collecting in 1982, 1st Round Collectibles has been our baby since 2011. Our Boom to Boom Collection has amassed 15,000 BGS cards representing the first sports card boom until the second (1989-2020) across 9 different sports:
Football // Basketball // Hockey // Formula 1 // Wrestling // Baseball // Golf // Tennis // Boxing
Our purpose has always been to create an incredibly large and diverse, high quality and simple-to-navigate offering of modern BGS sports cards for the sports fan.
We’ll be releasing them for sale in periodic drops by sport.
Thank you again for stopping by 1st Round Collectibles!
FAQs
We receive a number of messages from people who are new to collecting or have just got back in recently. They ask about some of the terms and how to classify cards. So, we did an FAQ.
1) What is a GISTO?
GISTO or Gisto stands for “Graded 1st Overall”. Stylized as G1STO.
It’s the first card that is graded for each card that is released. In the case of Beckett, this is determined based on the sequential BGS serial number that each card uniquely receives. Whether it’s 1st edition books, 1st edition Pokémon cards, or the 1st in a print run for serial numbers on cards getting the 1st is always the most important. In that spirit, we’ve been collecting Gisto’s for almost 10 years and have amassed a reserve of over 8,000 1st Graded BGS cards
Every card in our store that is a Gisto will have the ‘G1STO’ logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the display image.
Pro-Tip: The more times a specific card is graded, the higher the value of the Gisto, because it makes the original more rare.
Pro-Tip 2: We encourage you to sign up for a free account with Beckett. You can search by serial number with their ‘Serial # Lookup’ or see all the details about a specific card and how many have been graded in the ‘Population Report’*.
2) What does POP mean in your listing?
POP or Population refers to how many times a specific card has been graded since its release by a specific grading company, regardless of what grade it received. When the listing reads ‘POP 1’ or ‘POP 3’ etc., it’s slightly different because it’s referring to how many times that card has been appraised at its highest grade by Beckett.
For example, if a card is listed as a ‘POP 1’ and its grade is 9.5, then no version of this card is graded higher than a 9.5, and there is only one of them.
Another example: if the listing read POP 6 and the card was an 8.5, that means no version of the card has graded higher than 8.5 and only 6 of them have received that grade. If there were a version of this card graded as an 8, our listing would not reference POP because it is lower than the highest grade of this card so far, 8.5. The 8 would just be part of the overall population for that card.
For listing purposes, once a card passes POP 9, we just put ‘HGIP’ in the listing, which is: Highest Grade in Population.
3) Why do some BGS cards have subgrades and others don’t?
Beckett offers two options when grading cards: with subgrades and without. Both cards contain the overall grade, but subgrades show how BGS came to that grade. Using the four main categories: Corners, Edges, Surface and Centering, BGS gives all 4 categories their own grade out of 10. Subgrades are much more valuable because they are more attractive, cost almost double the price of non-subs to grade and show the true nature of how a card received its grade. There is a difference, in both quality and value, between a 9.5 overall grade with subgrades of 9.5, 9.5, 9.5, 9 compared to an overall 9.5 grade with subs of 10, 10, 9.5, 9.5. While some grading companies have been smart enough to copy them, this is a serious competitive advantage for BGS.
From their inception, BGS always gave out subgrades, However, in an effort to meet the extremely high demand for their product and diversify their offering, Beckett launched its first service without subgrades called the ‘Single Grade Service’ in July 2016. This allowed for one overall grade without being specific about how they came to that conclusion. This brought many more people into the market and in turn drove up the value of the cards that had subgrades on them. However, the cost to get subgrades from BGS was eventually doubled, and then tripled and now sits at 5X the price it was just a few years ago.
At 1st Round, we only sell cards that have subgrades. We believe that a key component that separates BGS from its competitors, aside from being the long-term industry standard for modern cards, are the subgrades. We provide one exemption to this rule and it’s for Gisto’s we’ve acquired from other collectors who had that card graded without subs. Gisto trumps subs in that case. So, all of our cards, save for some Gisto’s, have subs!
Lastly, we have no cards that came pre-graded like the UD Graded Series or the more recent Panini Encased. Every single one of our cards has literally been handpicked, with the majority submitted to BGS for grading by us. No issue, just preference.
4) Why do some of the grades have a ‘+’ beside them in the listing?
To receive a ‘+’ rating in the listing, a card must be .5 of a subgrade away from achieving the next highest grade.
For example, a card that has subgrades of 9.5, 9.5, 9.5, 8.5 has the overall grade of 9. It is .5 subgrade away from being a 9.5 (if the 8.5 sub was a 9), so it’s deemed a 9+
Just like the Gisto, this isn’t something Beckett puts on the name plate in the graded card slab. It’s just something we do to let the collector quickly identify that this was very close to being graded higher and that it is in better shape than the other cards with the same overall grade. It’s the reason subgrades exist and we add that as a helpful service.
5) How do you classify a Rookie Card?
The official rookie card is any card listed on Beckett with the ‘RC’ logo or any direct parallels of that exact card.
Any card from a player’s rookie year that does not have that logo on Beckett (or isn’t a parallel version of one that does), is classified as a ‘Rookie Year Card’ and does not have ‘RC’ in our listing. This also includes cards that the manufacturer has printed ‘RC’ on like inserts, subsets and multiple cards in the same set as the official rookie card.
Any card released before that (minors, international, College, NXT, Junior etc) is called a ‘Pre-Rookie Card’.
Some sports do not always have the ‘RC’ designation on Beckett, so they are determined one of two ways:
One, if the ‘RC’ logo is on the card (following the same rules as above), it’s a rookie card.
Second, for cards that don’t have that logo on them and are not labeled ‘RC’ on Beckett, we use their first official card(s) from traditional card manufacturer(s).
If a card has been released that isn’t classified as a ‘traditional rookie card’ (i.e. a team issued card, a promo card, playing card, non-traditional company card: like a food, toy or comic company, or as an addition to a late issued set from the previous year) then the first major card released after that is their ‘official’ rookie card.
Again, there are slight adjustments to this rule for sports that do not (or did not) produce a lot of traditional cards. Look no further than the 1998 Duocards releases for The Rock, Triple H, Kane, Edge and many many more. Or the 2000 Comic Images releases for Kurt Angle and others. Because of this, we view all non-traditional first year wrestling cards as rookies as well as all traditional manufacturer rookie card. So, for example The Rock’s 1998 DuoCards WWF #15 is viewed as a rookie card, as well as all of his 2001 releases like Fleer WWF Championship Clash #1 and Fleer WWF Raw Is War #39.
This sort of issue has existed within Formula 1, Golf, Boxing and Tennis, and the same rules apply
6) Do I get the card pictured?
You will always get the card pictured. We do not use stock images
7) Where do I find the Beckett serial number?
On each graded card, directly underneath the large overall grade in the top right-hand corner of the name plate, you’ll see a 10-digit number. That is the BGS serial number, unique to that card.
For some of the older Beckett cards, that number is on the back where the subgrades are. These represent cards that were graded during Beckett’s earlier days and have the original name plate design.
Either way, all of our items show front and back, so each serial number is clearly visible.
Industry Overview
While there has been dramatic (and necessary) growth over the last few years, we shouldn’t view this as a short-term aberration. It’s also true that the pandemic and some other co-factors reignited many people’s passion for the hobby, but they aren’t what caused the business to start going mainstream. Sports cards have been around for 150 years and sports itself is already one of the most important things in many people’s and family’s lives. Monster companies and the sports leagues are all in. Billions of dollars have been invested and what was once our little hobby is now a Wall Street player which should not be seen as a fad anymore.
And while nothing will stop the train, if there is one thing that can stifle its momentum it’s this…
In today’s sports card environment, it’s like almost everyone is chasing the same few players, cards or brands. The hobby is showcasing countless selling price records and the seemingly endless supply of 1 of 1 cards, and it’s scaring the average sports fan away. A sports fan that wants to collect; that wants to get in the game.
To make the problem worse while pushing away the collector-in-waiting further, this approach also lends itself to try and turn collecting into a metrics-based system. One that looks to turn sports cards into strictly a commodity. This isn’t gold or rice futures; this is deep passion and strong connection. You can’t turn an emotion into a commodity. Emotion will determine the value, not an algorithm. Most people who are in the business for that reason will leave as soon as things stop going up and to the right all the time.
And while those advances have added so much to the business and have made it better, it’s trying to become the only way to collect. That is very prohibitive to growth.
In this world, we are the exception.
We don’t serve the industry, we serve you, the sports fan.
Join us as we showcase one of the most comprehensive and diversified collections of modern BGS cards in the world.
*Disclaimer: Our store uses Beckett’s population report to determine Gisto and population. We screenshot and date each item when they are listed. If there is a discrepancy between what is in our store and what is on Beckett, Beckett will be the final say. We cannot accept responsibility for any changes and updates that Beckett makes to its population report on items after we’ve listed them. We can only provide the information they provide. If for some reason there is a discrepancy, we use Beckett’s sequential serial number system, and not the actual date graded, as the accurate information. Please check Beckett for the most up to date information.