What's the rarest card you own?

[whiteymet]

Hi Guys:

Since others have shown Post-War cards in this thread I will take the liberty as well to show this card from my collection.

You can read about the card below in an article written by Keith Olbermann in SCD:

As long ago as 1975, I wrote a column for one of the hobby’s earliest magazines, The Trader Speaks, listing all the known variations in the Topps sets issued to that point. Where I got the information, I can’t say for sure – it may have come from the research of the collecting pioneer Richard Egan. But there they were, listed as the variations for 1960:
- No. 9 Faye Throneberry (Yankees logo instead of Senators)
- No. 58 Gino Cimoli (Cardinals logo instead of Pirates)
- No. 102 Kent Hadley (Athletics logo instead of Yankees)

These cards were so scarce that I never even saw a picture of one of them until 12 years later. They had never been included in checklists of the 1960 set, and had been dismissed in hobby lore as unissued proofs or just unfounded rumors. Yet when the card of Cimoli turned up, it looked almost exactly like the issued card – it was the same thickness, it did not look like it had been cut from a sheet, and it had a fully printed back. The only differences were that it identified Cimoli – front and back – as a member of the Cardinals, had the Cardinals logo, and made no mention of his December 1959 trade to the Pirates. Up until that point, no Topps proof sheet had ever turned up with anything other than a blank back. To all appearances, it looked like an issued card – an incredibly scarce variation.

The Hadley card proved even more confusing. It came to the market in a Mastro auction in 1999 and sold for nearly $14,000 (my fault). Like the Cimoli, it looked like an issued card. But unlike the Cimoli, this one was up to date. It noted Hadley’s trade from the Athletics to the Yankees, and identified his team – front and back – as the Yankees. The only variation was the logo. Where the Yankee insignia was on all the other known copies, there was the Athletics’ symbol. It didn’t make any sense.

Addendum to Keith's article. These three cards are now listed in the SCD Standard Catalog