Best Mosaic Football Cards [2023]

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Mosaic has quickly paved its way to the front best football cards to buy, offering flashy colors and designs, retired and current greats, and fun parallels like genesis and honeycomb.

And with the 2023 season just a couple of weeks away, what better time to look at the best mosaic football cards currently available.

As of September 2, 2023, these are the top selling Mosaic football cards (by sales volume) over the last 30 days.

Takeaways

Looking through the list, there are certainly some patterns and things that jump out.

Rookies (and Quarterbacks) Rule

As with most valuable card lists, the rookie card dominates the charts. Just like a first edition book, the first card of most players is often going to be one of the most sough-after.

Here are the top rookies you’ll find when diving into the most popular Mosaic football cards:

• Brock Purdy, San Francisco 49ers
• Trevor Lawrence, Jacksonville Jaguars
• Joe Burrow, Cincinnati Bengals
• Kenny Pickett, Pittsburgh Steelers
• Jalen Hurts, Philadelphia Eagles
• Justin Herbert, San Diego Chargers
• Justin Jefferson, Minnesota Vikings

From the list above, you can also see most are quarterbacks, which is no surprise. Thus, if you’re opening Mosaic, it’s probably a good idea to penny sleeve and top loader any rookie quarterback, because like Brock Purdy has shown, one might get thrust into the spotlight, and the sky is the limit if they are successful.

Base or Debut

On most Mosaic checklists, you’ll see that many rookies have two cards—their base card and their NFL debut card. For example, in 2022 Mosaic, Kenny Pickett’s base rookie card is #301, and his NFL debut is #270. (Only made more confusing by the fact that both of Pickett’s cards look nearly identical; but note the differences in the cards below).

2022 Panini Mosaic – [Base] #301 – Rookies – Kenny Pickett

2022 Panini Mosaic – [Base] #270.2 – NFL Debut – Kenny Pickett

In terms of value, I’d say base cards have a slight edge over debut, but not by much if any. For example, here is the 30-day average comparing Jalen Hurts’ two base cards from 2020 Mosaic. You probably can’t see from the card images, but the base #222 has an average sales price of $5.58 and the NFL Debut $3.65.

With Kenny Pickett, though, his 30-day average on his base Mosaic rookie is $3.01 while his NFL Debut average is $3.25. That does change if you shorten the window to 14 days, with base average value surpassing the NFL Debut.

Parallels Galore

Last, we aren’t only looking at base version cards and their NFL Debut counterparts, but parallels across them both. Silver, pink camo, green, and more—which is the best.

Again, looking at Kenny Pickett, here is how the different parallels rank by card (30-day averages):

Card #270:

• Mosaic SSP $269
• No Huddle Purple /50 $150
• Orange Fluorescent /25 $238
• White Mosaic /25 $183
• No Huddle $23.50
• Red $16.75
• Silver $13.99
• Pink Camo $12.05
• Green $11.55
• Base $3.01

As you can see, base cards are typically going to be at the bottom, with green, pink camo, and silver parallels all along the same value lines, at least in this example.

To end, here is a look at the 30-day average for a few other players and their parallel stack:

Brock Purdy #367

• Silver $33.54
• Pink Camo $26.93
• Green $26.12
• Base $6.69

Trevor Lawrence #301

• Silver $38.57
• Green $30.02
• Pink Camo $26.43
• Base $4.55