Card collector does the unthinkable with rare Tigers' Tarik Skubal 1/1

Topps released their 2025 Series 1 Baseball set on Feb. 12, featuring over 350 players across base cards, every kind of colored and/or numbered parallel you could possibly think of, autographed cards, memorabilia cards, and inserts — some much harder to find than others — as a kind of unofficial heralding of the new season.

This year, they brought back the All Aces insert from 2023, but made it a lot harder to find. The design, resembling that of traditional playing cards, features 25 starting pitchers (former and current), including the Tigers' own Tarik Skubal and Jackson Jobe, and it's one of the rarest you'll find in the set.

A single All Aces card can typically only be found in 1:287 jumbo boxes (if you're not a card person, that's the largest amount of cards you can get in one box, going for around $250 on the resale market). With the All Aces Gold parallel, however, which are all one-of-a-kind, the odds get exponentially tougher at one in every 250,855 in jumbo boxes.

A lucky collector, Colby Duvall, managed to find Skubal's 1/1 All Aces Gold card just one day after Series 1 was released. He made it clear that he didn't intend to sell it, and instead preferred to give it to Skubal. It reached Detroit's ace in Lakeland on Friday.

Card collector gifts one-of-a-kind Topps Series 1 All Aces card to Tigers' Tarik Skubal

In a video posted by the Tigers, Skubal read a note from Duvall that confirmed the Tigers had offered something in return — a signed jersey and the opportunity to meet the man himself. However, for reference, the base version of this cards is so hard to find that it's going on eBay for over $200 on average. More 1/1s of other players have yet to surface, but with the prices of those base versions (Shohei Ohtani's is going from anywhere between $400-$700), a 1/1 would go for thousands.

A lot of collectors would've immediately put that card up for sale, kept it for themselves, or negotiated for more than a signed jersey and a meet-and-greet, but Duvall did a generous thing offering it to Skubal. For anyone else who might've been hoping to find the one — unfortunately, that'll have to wait until next year.