Unopened box of more than 10,000 hockey cards sells for $3.7 million
A sealed box filled with unopened boxes of Canadian hockey cards sold for $3.72 million on Sunday after a father and son found them while cleaning the father’s home in Saskatchewan.
The high price takes into account the mystery within: the box may contain as many as 30 of the holy grail of collectible hockey cards, a 1979 Wayne Gretzky rookie card. Or maybe not.
The buyer is likely content with the uncertainty and willing to never know the answer, explains Jason Simonds, a sports card specialist at Heritage Auctionsthe Dallas-based auction house that brokered the sale.
“The person who buys this could crack open a few beers one night, open the case and then go to town with these 16 cases,” Mr Simonds said. “But there is a good chance that this will remain the case for at least the foreseeable future.”
This is because unopened boxes are not purchased solely for the potential riches contained within. Some people appreciate the nostalgic value of boxes from the 1970s and 1980s and may display them as is. Others buy unopened boxes as an investment. If the Gretzky card and others continue to rise in value, so will Sunday’s sales, Mr. Simonds said.
“When it comes to collecting cards, it’s often not just for profit,” Mr Simonds said. “It’s because they kind of have an attraction to 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 2021one of the cards sold for $3.75 million in a private sale brokered by Heritage Auctions.
Mr Simonds said the box sold on Sunday, the kind that would have been sent to a corner store or other card distributor, could have contained 25 to 30 Gretzky cards and would be a “statistical anomaly” if the box didn’t sell. to contain one based on the number of cards contained within.
The case was found while a father and son in Saskatchewan, who remained anonymous, were cleaning out the father’s home, which had a storage room stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, Mr. Simonds said. He said the father was an “avid” collector in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, often buying a few boxes of cards each year from a distributor and selling or trading the cards inside. He never got around to examining the case that was sold Sunday, which would have cost him about $150 in 1979, Mr. Simonds said.
The box went to an anonymous buyer in Canada, Mr. Simonds said, breaking the record for the most money spent on unopened sports cards and the most anyone has spent on a hockey collectible.
Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specialized in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed there were 16 wax boxes in the box. Each box contains 48 packs of cards, with 14 cards per pack, for a total of over 10,000 cards. The set contains 396 different player cards, which means that if the assortment were completely random, it would contain 27 Gretzky cards, according to the auction house’s listing.
If the box contains a few dozen of the prized Gretzky cards, they may not be in good condition, Mr. Simonds warned. The cards may be slightly off center, have ink stains or other defects.
The buyer may never find out.
Mr Simonds said if the case were opened it would likely mean the individually sealed boxes inside would be sold. “There aren’t many people willing to spend $4 million on a box of hockey cards,” he said, “but at a quarter of a million dollars per box, there’s a slightly larger audience.”