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Working pick#047

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Rookie research

Vitor Belfort
Rookie Card Case

The candidates, the evidence for each, and which card FightCardboard treats as the working pick.

  • Working pick2006 PRIDE FC #047
  • SubjectVitor Belfort
  • Year2006
  • ManufacturerDSE (Dream Stage Entertainment)
  • ConfidenceProbable
  • Print runUnknown — not estimated
Probable×2Uncertain×1View sources & research

Why this is the working pick

Belfort won a UFC tournament in 1997 and fought in PRIDE from 1999, but no card of him existed until the Japanese PRIDE set of 2006, so nothing about his cardboard lines up with a conventional rookie year. Sports Card Investor tracks 2006 PRIDE FC #047 as his earliest card and no earlier issue has been found. No manufacturer designation exists, and no database names a Belfort rookie card outright; the pick follows the same convention databases apply to the set's other PRIDE-era Brazilians. The 2009 Topps bout card that marketplace catalogues tag '(RC)' is three years later, shared with a second fighter, and the tag is not reliably attached to Belfort.

The only Belfort card that exists from his prime: he was 28, a former UFC light heavyweight champion and a PRIDE regular when DSE put this set out in Japan in January 2006. It is a Japanese-market product that never reached Western retail, which is why it is absent from most English-language price guides — SportsCardsPro has no Belfort Pride row at all and Cardbase's set page does not surface him. Getting one usually means a specialist PRIDE dealer or a Japanese seller.

Identifying it

  • Three-digit card number in the 1–142 base run; dealers write it #047, price guides write it #47 — same card.
  • Base version has no foil signature across the photograph; Gold Foil Signature and Silver Foil Signature parallels carry a printed facsimile autograph and are not signed cards.
  • Set is variously catalogued as 'Pride FC', '2006 DSE Pride Fighting Championships', 'Pride Card Collection' and, on PSA slabs, 'Pride Card Collection Grand Prix'.

Parallels

Base
—
Unnumbered
Gold Foil Signature
—
Probable
Silver Foil Signature
—
Probable
Holographic
—
Uncertain

Card milestones

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

The evidence behind each
  • 2006Earliest licensed card — Sports Card Investor keeps a dedicated card page titled 'Vitor Belfort 2006 Pride FC #47 Base' and lists it first on his subject page as the earliest of the 22 Belfort cards it tracks; the same set page places him at #47. Searches for a 1990s UFC-era card return nothing — the UFC had no trading-card licensee between the SEG years and Topps' 2009 deal.
  • 2006First MMA card — Sports Card Investor's Belfort subject page begins at 2006 Pride FC #47; no earlier card of him appears in Cardbase, Collectibles.com or SportsCardsPro.
  • 2009First UFC card — SportsCardsPro's 2009 Topps UFC Round 1 set list gives #15 as 'Marvin Eastman, Vitor Belfort'. Topps held no UFC licence before 2009.
  • 2010First certified autograph — Sports Card Investor's Belfort subject page titles the card '2010 Topps UFC #FA-VB Fighter Autographs (1st Auto)', and the same card page carries that label. No Belfort signature appears in either 2009 Topps UFC product.
  • 2006Recognized rookie card — No source names a Belfort rookie card directly. Collectibles.com does flag the same set's peers as rookies — its page for Anderson Silva reads '2006 Pride FC #003 RC' — which is the convention the archive follows here. The competing candidate, 2009 Topps UFC Round 1 #15, carries an '(RC)' tag in marketplace catalogue titles, but at least one of those titles attaches the tag to Marvin Eastman rather than to Belfort, and SportsCardsPro's rookie field on that card reads 'No'.

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

Vitor Belfort's rookie card: 2006 PRIDE FC #047 — Vitor Belfort.

His first licensed card of any kind is 2006 Pride FC #047, issued by Dream Stage Entertainment in Japan in January 2006 while he was a PRIDE fighter. Two independent sources record it: Sports Card Investor indexes '2006 Pride FC #47 Base' as the earliest Vitor Belfort card it tracks, and UK dealer Combat Kingdom lists '2006 DSE Pride Fighting Championships Trading Card - #047 Vitor Belfort'. Nothing earlier surfaced in any reachable source, despite his UFC 12 tournament win in 1997 and a PRIDE run beginning in 1999 — the UFC simply had no trading-card licensee between the SEG years and Topps' 2009 deal. No Belfort card carries a manufacturer RC logo from the period he was actually a new fighter, so 'rookie' here is hobby and database convention applied retroactively, exactly as it is for Wanderlei Silva and the other PRIDE-era Brazilians.

Probable

2006 PRIDE FC #047 — Vitor Belfort.

Uncertain

Card number 047/47 is agreed by the two sources that record the card, but neither of the large price-guide catalogues indexes it: a SportsCardsPro lookup for a 2006 Pride Belfort card returns nothing, and Cardbase's 2006 Pride FC page does not list him among the cards it surfaces. The parallels are inferred from the set's structure (Cardbase counts 141 Gold Foil Signature, 141 Silver Foil Signature and 140 Holographic against 142 base cards, so nearly every base card has them) rather than confirmed for #047 specifically. TCDB, which holds the fullest checklist for this set, could not be consulted.

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