This Very Rare Kurt Warner Rookie Card Was Only Sold at an Iowa Chain

One of the many perils of being a sports card collector is the fact that you never have everything you want. You never will. There are so many different card sets, parallels, small print variants, and more that it's impossible that you will be in possession of every single one you could ever want. Unless your net worth is in the millions and you somehow don't have many other expenses.

That being said, when Catherine brought to my attention a card I had never seen before, and truthfully didn't even know existed, I knew I wanted it. It only took about two minutes of sleuthing to realize I'd probably never get it. Finding ones available was hard enough. Finding ones that were affordable was an impossibility.

If you're from Iowa, or even an NFL fan, you don't need the story of Kurt Warner rehashed. Warner was one of the most incredible players of his era, the only undrafted player to be named both an NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP. After spending a couple seasons with the Arena League's Iowa Barnstormers, the Northern Iowa graduate found himself on the St. Louis Rams.

He eventually took the starting quarterback position and led the Rams to a Super Bowl victory in 1999. He would later lead the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl in 2008 only to lose to the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is unequivocally one of the greatest Cinderella stories in sports history.

This week, the popular Facebook page Iowa Chill reposted a photo of a very rare Kurt Warner rookie card, one that features him in his Barnstormers gear. That alone makes the card rare, for there weren't a ton of Arena Football League cards produced in that era.

But what makes this little piece of sports memorabilia more noteworthy was it was a card you could only get at Taco Johns of all places. I can't find much information about how you'd get the card, but presumably, you had to buy a burrito or some potato oles or something like that in order to get your hands on it.

As of this writing, I can only find two of the cards listed on eBay. One is a BGS 8.5 (damn good condition for a card of this age) that is listed with a starting bid of $799 and an eye-popping "Buy it Now" price of $7,000. The other is a PSA 8 for just a little over $1,000.

These prices might be wishful for the sellers, but keep in mind: with so few on the market, those who are in possession of the card can set the market. That's just the way it is. Not to mention, the novelty of having a Kurt Warner rookie card that was commissioned and sold by an Iowa chain as popular as Taco Johns is pretty cool in itself.

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A couple years ago, Kurt Warner starred in a Hy-Vee commercial alongside Peyton Manning, recalling an early job he worked while he tried to make it to the NFL. Now, you can't write the history of the NFL without mentioning Warner's name, similar to the fact that I don't think my personal card collection will be complete until I have my hands on this quirky Warner rookie card.