Alpha Black Lotus PSA 10 Sells for $2.2 Million, Sets Public Magic: The Gathering Record
A 1993 Magic: The Gathering Alpha Black Lotus has sold for $2,208,200 at Goldin, setting a new record for the highest public sale of any Magic: The Gathering card. The PSA Gem Mint 10 card was one of the headline lots in Goldin’s Summer Goldin 100 auction, which closed over the weekend.
Goldin announced the final $2.208 million price Sunday and called it the all-time highest public sale for a Magic: The Gathering card. It is one of just three Alpha Black Lotus cards currently graded PSA 10, an extraordinarily small population for the most famous card from Magic’s original 1993 release.
Black Lotus was included in Limited Edition Alpha, the first printing of Magic: The Gathering. Illustrated by Christopher Rush, the card can be played for zero mana and sacrificed to produce three mana of any one color, an enormous advantage that helped make it one of the game’s most powerful cards from the beginning. Its place in Magic history, combined with the scarcity of surviving Alpha copies in elite condition, has made Black Lotus the card most closely associated with the highest end of the Magic market.
The latest sale takes that market to a new level in a public auction. A PSA 10 Alpha Black Lotus sold for $511,100 in 2021. The new $2,208,200 result is more than four times that amount and represents an increase of nearly $1.7 million in roughly five years.
The distinction between a public auction record and the highest known Magic sale overall is important. In 2024, an Alpha Black Lotus graded CGC Pristine 10 reportedly changed hands privately for $3 million. Because that transaction was a private sale, Goldin’s $2.208 million result still stands as the highest publicly recorded auction sale for a Magic card.
There is another famous Magic sale sitting near the same level. The unique 1-of-1 The One Ring card from 2023’s The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set was purchased privately by musician Post Malone for $2.64 million. That card was graded PSA 9 and, unlike Black Lotus, was intentionally produced as a single copy.
The Alpha Black Lotus that sold through Goldin represents a very different kind of rarity. It comes from Magic’s first print run, with Goldin estimating that only about 1,100 Alpha Black Lotus cards were originally produced. Nearly 33 years later, only three have reached PSA’s Gem Mint 10 grade. That combination has made a PSA 10 Alpha Black Lotus one of the toughest trophy cards in trading card collecting to acquire publicly.
The $2.208 million sale also comes during a period of extraordinary prices at the top of the trading card market. Pokémon cards have produced multiple seven-figure sales in 2026, including the record-setting $16.492 million sale of Logan Paul’s PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator earlier this year.
Magic has historically produced fewer multimillion-dollar card transactions, making the latest Black Lotus result particularly notable.