Karl-Anthony Towns reveals himself as buyer of $900,000 Aaron Judge card

The fourth highest publicly known sale of an Aaron Judge card ever occurred Sunday night when the New York Yankees slugger’s 2026 Topps Chrome Back-to-Back dual Gold Logoman patch autographed redemption card sold at auction for $900,000. On Monday, the buyer revealed their identity: New York Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns.

This was far from Towns’ first public splash in the sports card space. Last year he sold a Yoshinobu Yamamoto 2024 Topps Inception MLB Logoman one-of-a-kind rookie autographed card for $72,000 and earlier this year he offered up a six-figure bounty for John Cena’s best WWE card in existence.

Towns also launched Big Bodegas Breaks, an online trading card breaks company, and he shows off his growing personal collection on Instagram, which includes autographed cards of Michael Jordan and Stephen Curry among a dizzying array of grails across a wide variety of sports. In July, Towns had a massive presence at Fanatics Fest in New York City, where he bought cards, ripped packs and signed autographs on the Topps stage from vendors and participated in panels, along with the likes of Tom Brady and Logan Paul, discussing the sports card hobby.

NBA Champion Karl-Anthony Towns reveals he just spent $900,000 on Aaron Judge’s 1-of-1 Dual Gold Logoman Autograph Card 🤯

The fourth-most expensive Judge card of all time heads to KAT’s vault 👀 pic.twitter.com/q7Q1KJHX8Y

— Topps (@Topps) August 31, 2026

The Judge card that Towns purchased includes two Gold Logoman patches worn by the Yankees outfielder during each of the last two seasons to mark his consecutive MVP campaigns in 2024 and 2025. Judge signed the card above the 2025 Logoman patch and then penned “Back 2 Back MVP” below the 2025 patch. Towns will receive the actual Judge card once he presents the code from the redemption card that was pulled from a pack of 2026 Topps Chrome Baseball cards and put in the Fanatics Premier auction that ended Sunday.

The inclusion of Gold Logoman patch cards in Topps sets began in last year’s Topps Chrome set to honor each league’s 2024 MVP, Rookie of the Year and Cy Young award winners. Each player had special gold embellished versions of the silhouetted MLB Logoman patches on the back of all their jerseys throughout the following season to mark their achievement.

Those patches usually match the color scheme of each team’s jersey, so the gold patches stand out from those worn by every other player in the league. And when Ohtani, Judge and Tarik Skubal repeated their accomplishments in 2025 as NL MVP, AL MVP and AL Cy Young winner, respectively, something had to be done to commemorate that, too. So the dual Gold Logoman patch cards were created.

While the $900,000 Towns paid for the Judge dual Gold Logoman autographed card is significant, it’s still far off from what the Ohtani dual Gold Logoman autograph card sold for last month. Following multiple public bounty offers for millions from a variety of collectors and businesses, the Ohtani card sold for $11 million in a private deal last month to Matthew Allen (better known in the hobby world as “Shyne”) and his partners Kevin O’Leary and Paul Warshaw in Secure Collectibles, a high-end trading card investment firm.

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