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There aren’t many situations where it’s a wise move to spend $3.72 million on a box with contents that can’t be verified, but one collector who dropped that amount on some hockey cards decided to do exactly that in the hopes of capitalizing on a goldmine linked to Wayne Gretzky.
There are plenty of stories about people stumbling upon a fortune in the form of rare baseball cards that were rediscovered after spending decades sitting untouched in an attic or basement, and while the market for hockey cards may not be as lucrative, there’s still plenty of money to go around.
That’s especially true when the card in question was produced when Wayne Gretzky was a rookie for the Edmonton Oilers. There’s a reason the man who made his debut with that franchise in 1979 was eventually dubbed “The Great One,” as the legendary forward is inarguably the best player in NHL history and walked away from the sport with a lengthy list of records no one will ever come close to breaking.
In 2021, a Gretzky rookie card that was produced by O-Pee-Chee and graded as a “Gem Mint 10” shattered a record for hockey memorabilia in that particular category when it sold for $3.75 million.
As a result, it’s easy to understand why there was plenty of excitement when an unopened case containing 10,000 cards the company produced for the 1979-80 season was recently discovered in the home of a collector in Saskatchewan.
According to The New York Times, there’s no way to know how many Gretzky rookie cards ended up in the box in question (which contains 16 smaller boxes of the packs of cards that were designed to be sold at retail). With that said, it’s believed it could be home to as many as 30, and experts say there’s virtually no chance it doesn’t contain at least one.
The answer to that question remains a mystery, but it could theoretically be solved by the person who decided to purchase the cards for a grand total of $3.72 million at an auction that came to an end on Sunday.
The new owner of the cards (an anonymous buyer in Canada) has found themselves in a very interesting position.
They could obviously open the boxes to confirm the contents, and while they’ll almost certainly discover at least one of the Gretzky rookie cards in question, there’s no guarantee it will receive the same grade as the one that previously set the record (it may technically be “mint,” but variances in the production process means there’s no guarantee they were was printed perfectly).
There’s also a chance they decide to leave the box untouched in the hopes the market gets increasingly lucrative before seeing if someone else is willing to pay even more for Schrödinger’s Hockey Cards at some point in the future.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how things play out.