Unopened Case of More Than 10,000 Hockey Cards Sells for $3.7 Million

A sealed case full of unopened packing containers of Canadian hockey buying and selling playing cards bought for $3.72 million on Sunday after a father and son discovered them whereas cleansing the daddy’s home in Saskatchewan.

The excessive value takes under consideration the thriller inside: The case might comprise as many as 30 of the holy grail of collectible hockey playing cards, a Wayne Gretzky rookie card from 1979. Or it won’t.

The purchaser is probably going content material with the uncertainty, and ready to by no means know the reply, defined Jason Simonds, a sports activities card specialist at Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based public sale home that brokered the sale.

“The person who buys this, one night could crack open a couple beers and open up the case and then go to town on these 16 boxes,” Mr. Simonds stated. “But chances are it’ll stay as a case for at least the foreseeable future.”

This is as a result of unopened packing containers usually are not bought only for the potential riches inside. Some individuals respect the nostalgic worth of packing containers from the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties and may show them as they’re. Others purchase unopened packing containers as investments. If the Gretzky card and others proceed to extend in worth, so will the case bought on Sunday, Mr. Simonds stated.

“When it comes to card collecting, a lot of times it’s not just purely for profit,” Mr. Simonds stated. “It’s because they have some sort of draw toward Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or, in this case, Wayne Gretzky, which is the hockey equivalent of those guys.”

The 1979 Wayne Gretzky card issued by O-Pee-Chee is prized by collectors. In May 2021, one of many playing cards bought for $3.75 million in a non-public sale that was brokered by Heritage Auctions.

Mr. Simonds stated that the case bought on Sunday, the type that will have been shipped to a nook retailer or different card distributor, might embrace 25 to 30 of the Gretzky playing cards and that it could be a “statistical anomaly” for the field to not comprise any primarily based on what number of playing cards are inside.

The case was discovered whereas a father and son in Saskatchewan, who remained nameless, had been cleansing out the daddy’s home, which had a storage room stacked ground to ceiling with packing containers, Mr. Simonds stated. He stated that the daddy was an “avid” collector within the Sixties, Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, typically buying a few instances of playing cards annually from a distributor and promoting or buying and selling the playing cards inside. He by no means received round to analyzing the case that bought on Sunday, which might have value him about $150 in 1979, Mr. Simonds stated.

The field went to an nameless purchaser in Canada, Mr. Simonds stated, breaking the report for essentially the most cash spent on unopened sports activities playing cards and essentially the most anybody has spent on a hockey collectible.

Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specializes in unopened classic sports activities playing cards, confirmed that 16 wax packing containers had been contained in the case. Each field comprises 48 packs of playing cards, with 14 playing cards per pack, for a complete of greater than 10,000 playing cards. The set comprises 396 completely different participant playing cards, which implies that if the assortment had been completely random, it could comprise 27 Gretzky playing cards, in line with the public sale home’s itemizing.

If the case does comprises a pair dozen of the prized Gretzky playing cards, they won’t be in good situation, Mr. Simonds warned. The playing cards might be barely off-center, have ink smudges or different flaws.

The purchaser may by no means discover out.

Mr. Simonds stated that if the case had been to be opened, it could probably be to promote the individually sealed packing containers inside. “There’s not a lot of people that are willing to spend $4 million on a case of hockey cards,” he stated, “but at a quarter-million dollars a box, there’s a slightly larger audience.”