[BioCRN]

For modern minor league cards, a lot depends on the pool of player collectors once you get into junk wax era and beyond.

Rarity doesn't always matter, but rarity starts to actually matter at a certain point of number of collectors and the price starts to show up.

It seems elementary and "no duh" and all that, but there's a huge amount of people that will buy a RC that don't care about a player's minor league "RC" in comparison.

Personally experienced example, Mark Grace's 1986 Peoria card in NM/M+ condition could easily be picked up for $5-ish after the junk wax era died. It stayed that way for a very long time. During the recent COVID era hobby resurgence the card not only went up in price, it went up in popularity enough that you're looking at $35-40 for a raw copy in that kind of shape and a premium for graded examples. Almost everything spiked in price during this era, but not everything got a 7-8x value jump. The number of people wanting one finally caught up to the availability.