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Earliest card
2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127 Dominick Cruz — front
#127
Earliest card research

Dominick Cruz
Earliest Card

What exists, what does not, and which card the archive treats as the earliest.

  • Earliest card2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127
  • SubjectDominick Cruz
  • Year2010
  • ManufacturerTopps
  • ConfidenceProbable
  • Print runUnknown — not estimated
Probable×2Uncertain×1View sources & research

Why this is the earliest card

2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127 is Cruz's first card, now confirmed by two independent checklists rather than one, and it falls in the year Collectibles.com dates his rookie season to. Nothing earlier exists: he spent his whole pre-title career in the WEC, and no Cruz card appears in 2010 Topps UFC Main Event or 2010 Topps UFC Series 4. What is still missing is a source that names a specific Cruz rookie card — no manufacturer or database does — so the pick rests on chronology plus a rookie-year statement rather than on a rookie-card designation.

Dominick Cruz's earliest card. Topps UFC Knockout was a 150-card set released in December 2010, the same month Cruz beat Scott Jorgensen at WEC 53 to unify the WEC belt with the inaugural UFC bantamweight title — which is what got a fighter who had spent his whole career in WEC onto a UFC checklist at all. Topps had already put a 'WEC Fighter' block into 2010 Topps UFC Main Event earlier that year, with Urijah Faber at #144, but Cruz is not in it, and he is not in the 2010 Topps UFC Series 4 checklist either.

Commonly misidentified

Parallels are regularly sold as 'the rookie' — the Moment of Truth #39 Onyx and the Finest #66 Refractor both turn up in listings headed 'Cruz RC'. They are parallels of the 2011 base cards, and neither is his earliest card.

Identifying it

  • Base card #127 in a 150-card set, confirmed by Jeff Allender's House of Checklists and by SportsCardsPro
  • Parallel ladder off the base card: Gold, Silver /188, Green /88, Red /8 and an Octagon Mat 1/1
  • The Gold print run is the one figure the two checklists disagree on — SportsCardsPro shows /288, Jeff Allender's list carries Gold without a serial
  • Cruz is a WEC/UFC bantamweight champion card in a set otherwise heavy on UFC history subjects

What gets mistaken for it

What you'll readWhat's true
Cruz's first card is one of the 2011 Topps issues.2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127 predates Finest, Moment of Truth and Title Shot; collectibles.com also dates his card debut to 2010.

Parallels

Base
—
Unnumbered
Octagon Mat
1/1
Probable
Red
/8
Probable
Green
/88
Probable
Silver
/188
Probable
Gold
—
Probable

Card milestones

Five separate questions, kept separate. How these are defined.

The evidence behind each
  • 2010Earliest licensed card — Two independent checklists place him there: Jeff Allender's House of Checklists gives #127 Dominick Cruz in the 150-card 2010 Topps UFC Knockout base run, and SportsCardsPro's card page for #127 agrees on set, year and number. A SportsCardsPro product search returns no Cruz card in 2010 Topps UFC Main Event, and Cardboard Connection's 2010 Series 4 checklist has none either. No published manufacturer checklist for the base set has been seen directly, which holds the confidence at probable.
  • 2010First MMA card — Collectibles.com's register lists nothing before 2010, and no non-MMA Cruz card surfaced anywhere.
  • 2010First UFC card — Cardboard Connection confirms 2010 Topps UFC Knockout as a Topps UFC product released December 2010; Jeff Allender's checklist places Cruz at #127.
  • 2011First certified autograph — Jeff Allender's 2010 Topps UFC Knockout checklist contains no Cruz entry in any of that product's autograph or relic subsets, so nothing signed from 2010 precedes it; Jeff Allender's Finest checklist and SportsCardsPro both carry #A-DC. Whether the signature is on-card or on a sticker is not recorded anywhere.
  • —Recognized rookie card — Collectibles.com's register states 'Dominick Cruz debuted as a Rookie in 2010' without naming a card, and SportsCardsPro's rookie field reads 'Is Rookie Card: No' on every Cruz card checked, #127 included. No manufacturer printed a rookie logo on any of them, so the archive records his earliest licensed card instead.

Grading & population

Population figures will be taken directly from the grading companies and dated when they are. None are shown yet.

Sources & research Probable×2Uncertain×1

Every factual claim on this page, the evidence behind it, and an honest confidence level. Where sources disagree the disagreement is kept, not quietly resolved.

Probable

Dominick Cruz's earliest card: 2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127 — Dominick Cruz.

No source consulted designates an official Dominick Cruz rookie card. SportsCardsPro's data field reads 'Is Rookie Card: No' on every Cruz card checked, including 2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127, 2011 Finest UFC #66, 2011 Moment of Truth #39 and 2021 Panini Prizm UFC #2. Collectibles.com states he 'debuted as a Rookie in 2010', which matches the Knockout card's December 2010 release but names no specific card. Because he fought his whole pre-title career in WEC, which had no card programme, and because Topps' 2010 UFC Series 4 checklist contains no WEC fighters, 2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127 is the earliest Cruz card on record — so it is filed as his earliest card rather than as a rookie card. No card database entry has been located for any of them, so an RC flag in a database record cannot be ruled out.

Probable

2010 Topps UFC Knockout #127 — Dominick Cruz.

Uncertain

The card number 127 and the Gold /288 parallel come from SportsCardsPro only. Cardboard Connection confirms the set's 150-card size and December 2010 release but publishes no checklist, and TCDB, COMC and PSA could not be consulted while Beckett's database was in maintenance, so no genuinely independent confirmation of #127 was obtained.

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