'Holy Grail' hockey card collection discovered in Regina family basement

One extremely fortunate family from Regina, Saskatchewan is about to cash in BIG TIME thanks to a recently basement clean up.

The family, which has asked to remain anonymous, recently discovered an unopened case of hockey cards, featuring 6 unopened wax boxes of 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee (OPC) hockey cards, with 48 packs of 10 cards per box — a total of 7,680 cards.

The reason why this case is so valuable has to do with The Great One, Wayne Gretzky.

You see, Gretkzy's NHL rookie season was during that 1979-80 season, and a O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookie card in good condition is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Several have sold at auction for $200,000+ in recent years with one in mint condition selling for a whopping $3.75 million. Given the size of this mint condition case of cards, it is statistically probable that it contains 20 Gretzky rookie cards. Of course, the card packs were and still are sorted randomly, so nothing is guaranteed but the odds are that whoever wins the right to buy this set will have some of the most valuable cards in hockey history.

“No other unopened case of 1979-80 OPC has ever surfaced in the 21st century, and it's all but impossible to imagine another ever will,” Heritage Auctions said in its description for the lot. 

“[It's] the greatest unopened find in the 21st century,” the auction house said.

As of yesterday, bids for the lot passed the $1 million mark. With the auction set to run through the end of February, there's a very good chance that bidding will continue to climb. 

"By any metric of evaluation, it's a thrilling miracle of survival, and one of the greatest trading card lots that Heritage has ever had the privilege to offer,” Heritage Auctions said.

Steve Hart, owner of Baseball Card Exchange in Indiana and an industry specialist on sports memorabilia value personally authenticated the collection for Heritage Auctions.

“The family who have had this case for 40 some years, always assumed this was a 1980 case of hockey [cards], Hart said. “That’s not so bad [worth] $300,000 to $350,000, but one day someone finally asked them, ‘you might want to check and see what’s exactly in there,’” Hart said.

The owner believed the set to be from the 1980-81 season because of labelling on the box, but upon peeling back and inch of the box he found the white card cases inside actually said 1979-80. Which, of course, is the much sought after Gretzky rookie season set.

“The case says 1980 on it because the hockey season [the cards were released] straddled two years, it went 1979 and into 1980 and something that O-Pee-Chee did, which is the manufacturer, is they would put up the second year, the year that season’s finals would take place,” Jason Simonds from Heritage Auctions said.

“Up until now we weren’t exactly sure one of these existed. This is absolutely unbelievable,” Hart said.