AFL Select Cards 2020: The Complete Guide

If you're chasing AFL Select cards 2020, the short version is this: it's a modern set from a season that nearly didn't happen, released into a market that was about to go completely spare. That timing is the reason these cards get as much attention as they do, and it's the reason you need to be picky about condition rather than grabbing the first copy you see.

AFL Select cards 2020: what you're actually looking at

Select's AFL release is the biggest thing in Australian footy cards every year, and 2020 was no different — except for everything around it. The season stopped, players sat around wondering whether there'd even be a year, and then footy came back out of hubs with a grand final in Brisbane nobody had seen coming. Richmond finished the job, three flags in four years, and by the time the cards finally arrived, collectors had waited long enough to buy almost anything with a football on it.

On the surface, it's the usual Select package: a base set covering every club, team-based inserts, prediction cards and signatures. What makes the 2020 release worth knowing properly is the context. The worldwide collecting boom landed right on top of it, and footy cards became one of the few hobbies people could actually do in a lockdown. That's not a sales pitch, it's just what happened. If you're new to the AFL side of the hobby, the collector's guide on this site covers the basics of the brand properly.

How the 2020 release is put together

If you've opened a Select AFL release in the past decade, you already know the shape. A base set acts as the spine, then a run of inserts gives collectors something to fight over. The 2020 release follows the same architecture, split across the usual series rather than landing as one single drop.

Here's the structure you'll find, in one table:

Part of the release	What it is	Why collectors care
Base cards	The main set, covering every club's players	The backbone — you need these to finish anything
Team inserts	Club-focused cards in team colours	Team collectors' territory
Predictor cards	Brownlow, Rising Star and premiership predictor inserts	The chase, because everyone wants to be the one who picked the winner
Signature cards	Autographs of stars from the era and before it	The big-ticket items
Draft picks	The new players arriving into the competition	Where people try to get in early

None of it is unique to 2020 — it's the template for the whole modern era. What changes each year is the design, the checklist and who's hot, which is why two collectors can look at the same release and honestly disagree about which part matters. One will chase the signatures, another won't rest until the base set is done. Both are right, in their own way.

Who to chase from the 2020 set

The obvious starting point is Lachie Neale, who won the Brownlow Medal that year and ran Brisbane's midfield all season. His cards from this release are the ones people mention first, and that's easy to explain. Brownlow winners always carry interest, and Brownlow winners from the boom year carry more.

After that, look at the Richmond names. Three premierships in four years means that whole list stays popular, and the further that dynasty gets into the rear-view mirror, the better those cards hold up. Then there are the young blokes just starting to make a name for themselves. You won't always pick the future champion on the spot, but that's the fun of a set like this — the card you shrugged at when it came out is often the one you end up paying up for later.

It's also worth knowing what not to chase. Every release has commons dressed up to look like hits — foil borders, fancy names, small print runs that still don't make the card interesting. If the player doesn't matter, the card doesn't matter. Learn that once and you'll save yourself a lot of money at the card fair.

Condition is the whole game with modern cards

With a modern set, there's no sixty-year-old cardboard to worry about. These cards are new enough that corners are usually fine and surfaces are usually clean. The thing that actually varies is centring.

The design is printed straight on most of the sheet, but plenty of cards still come out of the pack visibly off — the white border wider on one side than the other. It's the first thing I check now, and the thing I got wrong for years when I was starting out. A card can be mint in every other respect and still look wrong if the image is sitting crooked on the cardboard. When you're unsure, get it flat and measure the borders properly; the centring calculator on this site turns it into a two-minute job instead of a guess. As a rough guide, most graders are looking for around 60/40 or better.

At a card fair, work through the same order every time:

• corners first, under a decent light;
• surface next, tilting the card to catch print lines or scuffs;
• the back, where nobody looks until it's too late;
• centring, with a calculator or a rule;
• only then the price.

If you're buying at a hobby shop rather than a fair, the same checklist applies — you just skip the haggling. And if you're thinking about grading, work the postage into the decision. From Australia, grading means sending cards overseas or to a local submission service, and either way it costs time and money. A card has to be worth that before you send it — grade the big ones, not the ones you happened to pull out of a packet.

Sort them, store them, finish the job

Once you've bought them, organising the set deserves as much thought as buying it. Most collectors sort by series and then by card number, with the chase cards pulled out on their own. If you're building a team set, sort by club first and worry about the master checklist later. Get a system going early, because a pile of unsorted modern cards becomes a headache faster than you expect.

Storage is simple: penny sleeve first, top loader second, and keep everything out of direct sunlight. Humidity is the quiet killer in this part of the world, so dry storage matters more than people admit. And when you're trying to work out what's actually in the release and what you still need, browsing the catalogue on this site is the quickest way to see what these sets contain — it beats trying to reverse-engineer a checklist from sold listings.

The same rules carry across to NRL

Anyone who collects both codes will already see the pattern. NRL trading cards run on the same machinery — base set, team inserts, signature cards that make everyone stand up a little straighter — and the same condition checks apply. If you can read a Select AFL release, you can read an NRL rugby league trading card release without missing a beat.

The footy cards space in Australia is AFL first for most people, but the NRL side is more organised than it gets credit for. NRL collector cards reward the same patience, the same sorting habits and the same attention to centring, and the market being smaller is exactly why the good ones hold up.

When the NRL cards 2026 releases eventually land, the collectors who learned these habits on the AFL side will be ready for them. If your main interest is on the league side, the NRL guide here goes through it properly. Same shape, same atmosphere, different jerseys.