Box with 10,000 hockey cards sells for R$18 million – 02/27/2024 – Sports

A sealed box full of unopened packets of Canadian hockey cards sold for $3.72 million on Sunday after a father and son found them while cleaning their house in Saskatchewan. In Canada.

The high price takes into account the mystery. The box could contain up to 30 of what is considered the rarest and most coveted card: a Wayne Gretzky debut card from 1979. Or maybe not.

The buyer is likely content with the uncertainty and prepared to never know the answer, explained Jason Simonds, a sports card specialist at Heritage Auctions, the Dallas-based auction house that brokered the sale.

“The person who buys this, in one night, could open a couple of beers and open the box and then have fun with these 16 packs,” Simonds said. “But chances are it will remain a box [fechada].”

That’s because unopened boxes aren’t bought just for the potential riches inside them. Some people appreciate the nostalgic value of 1970s and 1980s 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 box sold on Sunday, Simonds said.

“When it comes to collecting cards, it’s often not just for pure profit,” Simonds said. “It’s because they have some kind 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 Canadian is considered by many to be the best player in the history of the sport.

The 1979 Wayne Gretzky card issued by O-Pee-Chee is highly prized by collectors. In May 2021, one of the cards sold for US$3.75 million (R$18.5 million) in a private sale brokered by Heritage Auctions.

Simonds said the box sold Sunday — the kind that would have been sent to a convenience store or other card distributor — could have included 25 to 30 of the Gretzky cards. He went on to say that it would be a “statistical anomaly” if the pack did not contain any of these cards, based on the number of cards inside it.

The father and son who found the treasure remain anonymous. The box was found when they were cleaning out the father’s house, which had a room with boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, Simonds said. He said the man was an “avid” collector in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, often buying a couple of boxes of cards a year from a dealer and selling or trading the cards inside them. He never got to examine the box that was sold on Sunday, which would have cost around US$150 (equivalent to R$740 at current prices) in 1979, said Simonds.

The box went to an anonymous buyer in Canada, Simonds said, breaking the record for the most money spent on unopened sports cards and the most money spent on a hockey collectible.

Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator specializing in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed that 16 boxes were inside the box. Each box contains 48 packs of cards, with 14 cards per pack, totaling more than 10,000 cards. The set contains 396 different player cards, meaning that if the selection were perfectly random, it would contain 27 Gretzky cards, according to the auction house’s listing.

If the box actually contains a few dozen of the coveted Gretzky cards, they may not be in good condition, Simonds warned. Cards may be slightly off-center, have ink stains, or other defects.

The buyer may never find out.

Simonds said if the box is opened, it will likely be to sell the individually sealed boxes inside. “There aren’t many people willing to spend $4 million on a box of hockey cards,” he said, “but at $250,000 a box, there’s a slightly larger audience.”