- PSA 10s graded
- 3
- Held here
- 2
- Graded higher
- 0
Every collecting category has a card people talk about in a lower voice. In modern basketball inserts, one of those cards is Kaboom!.
Where Kaboom! started
Kaboom! first appeared in 2014–15 Panini Excalibur, a basketball product sold only at Target. The 49-card insert set broke from everything else in the hobby at the time. Instead of a photo on a foil background, each card was a full illustration: superhero-inspired artwork by Hungarian artist Gyula Nemeth, finished with a printing process that makes the art jump off the card in hand. Panini itself pointed to the cards' extreme scarcity when it showed off the set the following summer.
Kaboom! went on to become one of Panini's signature inserts and has returned across later products ever since. The market has noticed. In July 2026 a one-of-one green Kaboom! of Victor Wembanyama sold for $1.44 million, and a Tom Brady Green Kaboom! 1/1 sold for $660,000. Those are modern parallels of other players, but they show how hard collectors chase this design.
The 2014 Excalibur cards are the originals, and the originals are the hardest to find in top condition. Card #38 in that first set is Larry Bird.
The population
PSA has graded the 2014 Panini Excalibur Kaboom! #38 Larry Bird at Gem Mint 10 exactly three times. Two of those three are here. Anyone can verify both on PSA's site by certificate number:
- PSA 10 · Gem Mint63659089 ↗
- PSA 10 · Gem Mint66045749 ↗
Why it matters
Larry Bird's vintage cards are well understood; their populations have been tracked for decades. Modern Bird cards are a different market. Print runs are often tiny, many cards never get graded, and the PSA 10 population for a given card can be a single-digit number.
That is where Kaboom! sits: an iconic player, a first-year design that started a franchise, and a Gem Mint population you can count on one hand.
The Bird & Trout Collection is 760 PSA-graded cards, 670 of them PSA 10, built around Larry Bird, from 1981 Topps to modern one-of-ones.
Browse the full catalog Serious inquiriesSources: Panini America (Excalibur origin, set size, artist) · Bleacher Report · cllct · PSA population as of October 2026.