For most of the pre-internet era, there was no eBay sold-listings tab, no Card Ladder, no real-time comps. There was Beckett. A statistician named Dr. James Beckett had, in 1984, published the first truly comprehensive card price guide, and within a few years his monthly magazines were the single most trusted source of card values in the world. Collectors opened each issue to the price section and ran their finger down the high–low columns, watching the up and down arrows next to their favorite players. Those numbers were the market — Beckett's updates didn't merely report prices, they set them.

This is issue number one of the basketball edition. In 1990, as Michael Jordan was finishing the last season of his career without a championship, his face — mid-free-throw, locked in — became the cover of the magazine that an entire generation of collectors treated as gospel. Patrick Ewing took the back. It is a primary document of the moment the hobby formalized how it valued itself, with the player who would come to define that hobby on the front.

Graded magazines are a young and fast-emerging category, and high-grade Jordan covers are at the front of it. A PSA 9.8 launch issue — the first one ever, none graded higher — is exactly the kind of culturally foundational, top-of-census piece DimeLabs targets early, before the broader market fully reprices the category the way it already has with cards.