What happens when you combine the most prized card for any baseball card collection and smack it into the world of non-fungible tokens? You end up with a Honus Wagner NFT of course. Well, you end up with a type of Honus Wagner NFT of sorts.

One of the early January auctions at Golden.co is featuring a “Honus Wagner NFT” that is actually a rare “Vintagepep” NFT from the Rare Pepe set. Its designation is card #37 from Series 28, and the offering combines the famous Pepe the Frog meme’s image dubbed in where the Honus Wagner’s face would be on the T206 Wagner card that collectors have chased higher and higher in recent years.

It depends upon whom you ask for how many T206 Wagner cards really exist. Some estimates are closer to 60, but Goldin.co’s announcement indicates that roughly 50 copies of the famed T206 card survive. (Image below by Goldin.co)

The auction scene is already off to a very strong start for high-end sports collectibles in 2022. Collectors Dashboard evaluates high-end collectibles as an alternative asset class, implying that the collectibles market is attracting some of the same capital that would have otherwise ended up in stocks, bonds and other traditional investments. Investors are often in direct competition for the exact same assets as collectors, and it is now routine for eBay, traditional auction houses and other industry players to refer to the collectibles space as “assets” and “investments.”

Supply and demand have a role in the collectibles space just like in other asset classes. It turns out that the Vintagepep has some scarcity and some unknown numbers as well. According to Goldin’s description:

This NFT is one of 101 minted, with many of them lost in wallets making the population much lower than the original issuance. “Vintagepep” is card number 37 from Series 28 of the Rare Pepe set. The Rare Pepe Wallet NFTs are among the earliest minted, and a true collector’s item in this rapidly expanding field of the hobby!

The rare Vintagepep auction page has the full details.

OpenSea’s XCP Explorer designation: 15ygEs3LumCzoXDhEVGxQV55ErPzcAd6jn with token ID 292411. OpenSea shows that one transaction of this card #37 sold back on August 21, 2021 but there are other designations that were cited. The full details can be seen at OpenSea’s port for this NFT.

The current Goldin.co bid of $7,500 would translate to $9,000 with buyer’s premium and there have so far been 6 bids. This NFT auction has less than two days left as it ends on Saturday (1/08/22) at 10:00 PM Eastern Time. UPDATE: This item sold for $10,200 after the buyer’s premium and after 8 bids (see below).

This NFT appears to have also sold at Goldin Auctions back in November 2021. That was shown to have sold for a final price of $31,200.00 after the buyers premium and after 17 bids.

Comparing other Rare Pepe NFT sales may be less of an apples-to-apples comparison, but NFT Evening showed on November 7, 2021 that a Series 1 Rare Pepe Nakamoto Card had sold for a sum of $500,000 on November 5 during the third annual NFT.NYC conference. According to that report:

Mint Gold Dust, a digital ecosystem for connecting creators, sold the NFT to MetaKovan, who is famous for buying Beeple’s NFT for a record $69 million earlier this year. The vintage NFT auction was part of a series of auctions to showcase Mint Gold Dust’s marketplace.