ANOTHER AMAZING FIND: Unopened case of 1979 O-Pee-Chee Hockey cards featuring Wayne Gretzky rookies up for bid at Heritage

When the 2020 pandemic led to a dramatic boom in the sports card industry, two iconic rookie cards surged to the forefront, becoming two of the most valuable and sought-after cards in the hobby.

Fueled, in part, by his “Last Dance” documentary, Michael Jordan’s 1986-87 Fleer rookie card suddenly soared in value, routinely selling for six figures and topping out at over $1 million at auction.

Even more dramatic was the rise of the rookie card of another sports legend — hockey great Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky’s 1979 O-Pee-Chee rookie card sold at Heritage Auctions in 2020 for $1.29 million. (Two years later, Heritage auctioned the 1979 Topps version of the card for $1.2 million.) Heritage later brokered a private sale of a Gem Mint 10 copy of Gretzky’s OPC rookie card for an astounding $3.75 million, shattering the previous record.

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Imagine owning a whole, unopened box of 1979 OPC hockey cards that likely contain a Gretzky rookie card? Now imagine owning a full case — 16 unopened boxes — of OPC cards that could contain dozens of Gretzky rookie cards?

A case of 16 unopened, sealed boxes containing 768 packs of 1979 OPC cards was recently discovered in Canada and is currently up for bid in the Winter Platinum Night Sports Auction at Heritage Auctions. The case is believed to be the only unopened case of the 1979 OPC set to surface in the 21^st century. The rare find already has a bid of $1.35 million in the auction that runs through Feb. 24-25. Heritage estimates the case could sell for $2.5 to $3 million.

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Heritage sold a single unopened box of 1979 O-Pee-Chee Hockey in 2022 for $210,000.

“It’s like a unicorn in the hobby. It’s a mythical creature,” Jason Simonds, Heritage’s New York City Consignment Director for Sports, said in a video produced by Heritage. “It just doesn’t exist. Finds like this don’t happen. It’s a once in a generation thing.”

“This is absolutely unbelievable. This is probably the holy grail of any sport, [1970] and on up,” said Steve Hart of the Baseball Card Exchange, which authenticated and sealed the case.

The case was found in Saskatchewan, Canada at the home of a hockey card collector who collected countless Canadian-made cards to trade with collectors in the U.S. According to Heritage, he had so many cases and boxes of cards that his family eventually lost count. The 1979 OPC case was found by his son behind “stacks and stacks of other stuff.”

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The case is marked “1980 Hockey” because O-Pee-Chee used the second year of a season (1979-80) to label its cases of wax boxes. When the son of the consignor pulled back a corner of cardboard to see what was inside the case, the boxes were white, signifying the 1979 set (the 1980 set boxes were blue).

The case was then delivered to Hart’s Baseball Card Exchange, where Hart opened it and authenticated on camera.

“It looks like it was shipped from O-Pee-Chee yesterday,” Hart said in the Heritage video. “I always thought if we ever were going to find a case of this that it would probably be buried somewhere up deep in Canada and the owners probably didn’t even know what they had.”

Hart said the unopened boxes of wax packs were in “unbelievable shape.”

“This one is flawless,” he said. “They are as fresh as they come. These are the whitest boxes. I don’t I have ever seen a display box this clean.”

The case contains 16 boxes with 48 wax packs per box, with 14 cards in each pack, for a total of 10,752 cards. With 396 cards in the set, Heritage estimates there could be as many as 27 or more Gretzky rookie cards in the case.

If one of the Gretzky rookies winds up being graded GEM MINT 10, it would be rare indeed as only two OPC Gretzky rookies have ever received a perfect grade compared to more than 300 Jordan rookie cards. There have been 93 OPC Gretzky rookies graded PSA 9 that have sold for as much as $150,000.

“This is the first time and possibly the last time that one of these cases will ever show up in its original form on the open market,” Simonds said.  

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