A sealed case filled with unopened boxes of Canadian hockey trading cards sold for $3.72 million 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 case could hold up to 30 collectible hockey cards from the Holy Grail, a 1979 Wayne Gretzky rookie card. Or not.
The buyer is probably satisfied with the uncertainty and prepared to never know the answer, explained Jason Simonds, a sports card specialist at heritage auctionsthe Dallas-based auction house that brokered the sale.
“The person who buys it, might crack open a couple of beers one night, open the case and then go to town on these 16 boxes,” Mr. Simonds said. “But he’s likely to stay that way for at least the foreseeable future.”
This is because unopened boxes are not purchased just for the potential wealth they contain. Some people appreciate the nostalgic value of 70s and 80s boxes and may display them as is. Others buy unopened boxes as an investment. If the Gretzky card and others continue to increase in value, so will the case sold Sunday, Simonds said.
“When it comes to card collecting, a lot of times it’s not just for profit,” Mr. Simonds said. “It’s because they have some sort of attraction to Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or, in this case, Wayne Gretzky, who 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 case sold Sunday, the kind that would be shipped to a corner store or other card distributor, could include 25 to 30 Gretzky cards and that it would be a “statistical anomaly” for the box not to hold anything based on how many cards are inside.
The case was found while an anonymous father and son from Saskatchewan were cleaning out the father’s house, which had a storage room filled from floor to ceiling with boxes, Mr. Simonds said. He said his father was an “avid” collector in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, often purchasing a couple of cases of cards each year from a distributor and selling or trading the cards inside. He never got to examine the case 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 most money spent on unopened sports cards and most money spent on a hockey collectible.
Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specialized in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed that there were 16 wax boxes inside the case. Each box contains 48 decks 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 perfectly random, it would contain 27 Gretzky cards, according to the auction house listing.
If the case contains a couple dozen of the prized Gretzky cards, they may not be in good condition, Mr. Simonds warned. Cards may be slightly off-center, have ink stains, or other defects.
The buyer may never find out.
Mr Simonds said if the chest were to be opened, the individually sealed boxes inside would likely be sold. “Not many people are willing to spend $4 million on a pack of hockey cards,” he said, “but at a quarter of a million dollars a box, there’s a slightly larger audience.”
