A 1909 Sweet Caporal T206 Honus Wagner card featured on the Netflix series “King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch” became one of the most expensive publicly known sales of a Wagner card Saturday night. The PSA 1 graded card (on a scale of 1-10) sold for $5.124 million via Goldin Auctions, making it the third-highest sale of the iconic T206 Wagner.
This is the 16th publicly known sale since 2015, via Card Ladder, an online card sales database, of a T206 Wagner card for at least $1 million. A 17th sale will join the $1 million club as an SGC Authentic graded (condition below a 1 grade) T206 Wagner card carries a bid of $2.32 million through Heritage with seven days remaining in the auction.
“King of Collectibles” prominently featured the discovery of the Goldin-consigned Wagner card during the show’s latest season, which dropped in late December. The Shields family consigned the card to Goldin on the show.
Ken Goldin, CEO and founder of Goldin Auctions, said in December that “this is the biggest discovery in the hobby in the past 50 years” because of how extraordinary it is for a publicly unaccounted T206 Wagner card to come to light.
The Shields family consigned the 1909 Sweet Caporal Honus Wagner card to Goldin Auctions on the “King of Collectibles” show. (Courtesy of Goldin Auctions)
“I’ve never been able to trace a Wagner that has stayed in only one family since the day the card came out,” Goldin said. “The (Shieldses’) care and respect for their grandfather’s collection — carefully looked after behind closed doors for 116 years — has preserved one of the hobby’s true grails, and the importance of this cannot be overstated.”
The family inherited the Wagner from Morton Bernstein, who owned a silver manufacturing plant and started collecting trading cards in the early 1900s. Bernstein pulled the Wagner card from an original cigarette pack around that time. It was kept as part of a framed collection, passed down through the family and preserved by Bernstein’s grandsons, Dennis and Douglas Shields.
“My brother and I have held on to these for years,” Dennis Shields said in December. “It isn’t for monetary issue; but it was the sentimental value that our grandfather held on to these things all his life, and we held on to them just because we love him.”
The card received a PSA 1 grade after being removed from the framed collection. Of the 36 examples of the card graded by PSA, 10 have a 1 grade. There are only 53 total examples of the card graded by PSA and SGC. The card was pulled from production by the American Tobacco Company at Wagner’s request in 1909. Some say it was because he hated smoking and didn’t want his image in packs of cigarettes, and others say it was because he didn’t want anyone else to profit from his name and likeness.
Top 10 1909 T206 Wagner sales
- $7.25 million — SGC 2 grade; best offer; private sale; Aug. 4, 2022
- $6.61 million — SGC 3; auction via REA; Aug. 15, 2021
- $5.12 million — PSA 1; auction via Goldin; Feb. 21, 2026
- $3.72 million — PSA 1.5; auction via Goldin; Oct. 9, 2022
- $3.66 million — PSA 2; auction via Goldin; May 24, 2021
- $3.12 million — PSA 5 (miscut); auction via Goldin; Oct. 2, 2016
- $2.52 million — SGC authentic; auction via Heritage; Feb. 26, 2021
- $2.28 million — PSA 1.5; auction via Heritage; May 5, 2021
- $1.98 million — PSA authentic; auction via Mile High; April 27, 2025
- $1.97 million — PSA authentic; auction via Mile High; Sept. 8, 2023
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