1980-81 OPC Wayne Gretzky

I have mentioned in a previous post my admiration for the 80-81 Gretzky card. That was my first ever 80-81 Gretzky and not long after that I landed a second one as part of a complete 80-81 Topps set. So it would only make sense that someday I would land the OPC version right? Lucky for me this past spring my LCS landed a boat load of Gretzkys including his rookie and a few others. I sadly couldn't leave with the Gretzky which was easily in EX-MT condition with a $450 dollar price tag on it but I did manage to get his OPC 2nd year card for a very nice price which was in even better shape than the rookie.

80-81 OPC Wayne Gretzky

Classic photo!

Here is the back, avec texte francais. Currently the card books for $80 which I think is a travesty, but value is determined by whatever collectors will pay and obviously this isn't as desirable as his rookie or even other cards in the set. Still a drop off of 90% from rookie to second year card is pretty steep when you compare it with player cards. For example, Ray Bourque drop from an $80 RC to a $40 2nd year which is a 50% drop; Paul Coffey starts at 50 for a rookie and 12 for a 2nd year card in a very unpopular set. Paul's drop off is only 76% despite those factors. Messier is along the same path with a rookie booking for $100 and a second year at $25. I think the Bourque drop off is less because he is the first card in the set and they typically are higher because condition is sometimes a factor with first and last cards. If you used a Messier or Coffey model you would expect the Gretzky second year card to book closer to $200, but I guess supply and demand doesn't always follow patterns and trends. Personally I love looking at values and trends and this is one that I always found very interesting.

I do regret not trying work out a trade/pay deal for that rookie but I suppose there are many more of those rookies out there and I will someday land one of each (Topps and OPC) and it will be a very sweet day when that happens! 

ITG Decades Production Run

Since it will be several more days before I have my very own box of Decades 1980s to open, I thought I would so math about the product to pass the time.

Based on what ITG released about the game used production numbers and that there are 3 game used hits per box, I determined that there are 8148 boxes of ITG Decades out there.

Based on that run, you can expect a production run of the following:

100 years of collecting:

1 per box, 25 in total so the production run of each is about 325 each being un-numbered

Rookies:

1 per box, 45 in total, so the production run of each is about 181 each being un-numbered

Non-mem Inserts:

1 per box, 45 in total, so the production run of each is about 181 each being un-numbered

Autographs: Difficult to determine based on SPs and the 1/1's

3 per box, 170 in total, you could probably expect about 150 of each auto that isn't SP'ed.

Game Used numbers are released on the ITG website.

Without the product in my hands yet, I can already say this is a homerun!! Low production numbers, great quality swatches and on-card autos makes any collector happy. Personally I can't wait to get mine and when I do I will share what success or failure I ended up with. So what are you waiting for, go and get a box! I am sure you will be satisfied at the very least.

Victory Black Print Run

Last year I bought a box of 09-10 UD Series 2 and I shared my break with you. See post here:

Fast forward another year and it looks like my big hits from the box are doing pretty well. Couture is up for ROY and James van Riemsdyk is playing like a second overall pick with 7 goals in 9 playoff games. The nice thing about the van Riemsdyk RC is the rarity of it. Victory black used to be one of the hardest to find hits in hockey. In fact, back in 05-06, if you found a Victory black card in a pack, you had yourself a card numbered to 5. Even the gold cards from that set were numbered to 100 (I pulled a 05-06 Victory Gold Kovalev #/100 once).

Times have changed in Victory land, gold and black cards are much easier to pull now than they were in 05-06. Upper Deck stopped numbering the cards in 06-07 and more recently, they started releasing 1 rookie and 1 regular black parallel in each case of UD Series 2.

So how many Victory black rookies are there? If you look on eBay, sellers are taking advantage of the idea they are still numbered to 5, but that hasn’t been true since 2006. There is no way of REALLY knowing how many there are, but I can tell you the minimum number of them.

The key to calculating the number rests in the fact that UD exclusives cards are numbered and seeded. There are 250 cards in the 09-10 Series 2 set, of which, Upper Deck produced 100 numbered cards of each of them. These cards are distributed at a rate of 1 in 48 hobby packs. That means there are 1.2 million hobby packs produced for 09-10 UD Series 2. If you factor in there are 2 Victory black cards for each 288 packs (the number in a case) then you are looking at about 8333 Victory black cards in all those hobby packs. If there are 90 victory cards in the update set, that means there are 92 Victory black cards for each card in the set.

92 is the minimum number, if you factor in there could also be Victory black in retail and fat packs that number would be higher. If they distributed the cards unevenly (ie the imbalance between 50 regular and 40 rookie cards in that set, that number could also rise).

Either way, it seems to expect there are only 5 victory black rookies is quite unreasonable now as the number seems more like 100. If you find yourself wanting to buy a victory black card on eBay, keep this in mind. Sure these numbers are only applicable to the 09-10 Victory Update set, but I imagine the numbers aren’t much different for the 10-11 Victory Update set as well. In fact I think the reasonable expectation is a print run of about 80-100 Victory black cards.

05-06 The Cup - Jimmy Howard

Paul from Card Boarded asked about the odds of pulling a Jimmy Howard rookie from a tin of 05-06 The Cup. I am interested in a similar case, which would be pulling a Zach Parise from a tin. Either case has the exact same odds which I will get in to in a moment.

The 05-06 The Cup set featured 91 rookies and 100 base cards. The base cards where numbered to /249, the patch auto rookies which were cards 101-177 where numbered to /199. There were three shorter printed patch rookies which were numbered to /99 and finally there were 11 other auto rookies numbered to /249.

In all, there were 18359 rookie cards printed in the set. In the case of Jimmy Howard, he made up 199 of the 18359. When doing the probability of the getting a Jimmy Howard in an 850 dollar tin, you need to know how many rookies you are going to get in your tin. Each tin was supposed to have 5 cards in them. Some would be base cards and the rest are rookies, parallels or inserts. Based on what I have seen online, you can expect on average between 1.5 and 2 rookies per tin. Some will only have one, while others seemed to have 2 or 3. I will use 1.5 as an approximation.

Based on an average of 1.5 rookies per tin the probability of getting a Howard or Parise rookie is:

1.626%

Not the greatest odds, but much better than the 0.81% chance of getting a Crosby RC.

05-06 The Cup Howard rookie. Probably better to just buy it rather than hope to pull it.

05-06 Parise RC. Much like the Howard, can be had for cheaper than the box.

The Cup is always a great product, but has been far beyond my price range. I would rather use the money to buy a couple different boxes than take a chance with a 5 card tin of The Cup. With that being said, I still like to try and snag The Cup singles when I come across a good deal but the risk on buying a tin isn't worth the gamble for me. Have any of you bought a tin before? How did it turn out?

Pulling a Wayne Gretzky rookie from a pack

A little while back I put out a request for math and collecting related ideas. Sal from Puck Junk gave me a few good ideas and here is the first one.

Something that has always been a dream of mine is to open a pack of 79-80 OPC and pull a pack fresh Wayne Gretzky rookie card. Having been too young when the cards were available for 20 cents and not having the $13495 for a box or $300+ dollars for a pack, all I can do is dream and look at the math.

Before I get into the math, there are always assumptions one makes with probability.

All packs are sealed, unsearched and you don't look at the back to see what card is there.

Each pack has 14 cards, no more and no less.

That each pack has randomized cards and by buying a box you aren't guaranteed to get a full set and you could get doubles of cards in the same pack.

Getting a Gretzky in a pack

Based on the set size and pack size, you have about a 3.48% chance of getting a Gretzky in a single pack. This includes the fact that you could get doubles of some cards in the pack.

Getting a Gretzky in a box

Based on set size and pack size, you have about an 81.72% chance of getting a Gretzky in a 48 pack box. This includes getting more than one which I am sure anyone spending 13K one a box would hope for a couple. Each box should give you 672 cards which in a perfect world would be a complete set and 276 other cards.

Here is a pretty cool image I found online of a Gretzky still in the pack.

Here is a shot of the front.

Here you can see the back and a bit of the Oilers jersey. I wonder if Wayne has a wax stain?

Another shot of the back.

Just for fun, I did a computer simulation of opening a 79-80 OPC box.

Here are some of my hits:

1 Gretzky Rookie #18

2 Jets Logo #81

2 Oilers Logo #82

1 Ken Dryden #150

3 Gordie Howe #175

1 Bobby Hull #185

2 Mike Bossy #230

1 Nordiques CL #261

Virtual Box Break

329 out of 396 (83%)

343 doubles

In all, my virtual break wasn't as successful as I hoped...good thing I didn't pay 13 grand for it. 1 Gretzky is better than none, but the grade and condition could make or break it. Missing 17% of the set also sucks, but with 343 doubles I am sure I could have traded for the rest.

I enjoyed doing the virtual break and would like to maybe do some others, if you can think of other boxes that need to be "virtually" busted please send along some ideas!

What are your chances?

Well based on my experiences I decided to statistically work out the probabilities of not getting a young gun rookie in either a blaster box or a hobby box. Based on my Upper Deck letter, they basically state the odds are for the ENTIRE production, so in theory you could have a hobby box loaded with YG's or a hobby box devoid of the coveted rookie cards. Using my math skills (I teach the stuff after all) I worked out the probabilities of both.

Starting with Hobby Boxes

Each box has 24 packs (both hobby and retail) and both seed YG's at a rate of 1:4. Based on those odds you could in theory have 0 YG's and 24 YG's if they put at most one in a pack. Here are the odds:

#Young Guns Odds

0 0.10%

1 0.80%

2 3.08%

3 7.52%

4 13.16%

5 17.55%

6 18.53%

7 15.88%

8 11.25%

9 6.67%

10 3.33%

11 1.41%

12 0.51%

13 0.16%

14 0.04%

15 0.01%

>16 Very small chances.....Some a little as winning the lottery

Blaster Boxes 12 packs with 1:6 chances

# Young Guns Odds

0 11.22%

1 26.92%

2 29.61%

3 19.74%

4 8.88%

5 2.84%

6 0.66%

7 0.11%

8 0.01%

9 0.001%

10 0.000076%

11 0.0000028%

12 0.000000046%

So it appears the odds of having a blaster box like mine aren't too outrageous which is a shame for anyone who pays $25 for one and ends up with base cards. With that being said, of course there are various different types of blaster boxes some seed 1:4 and give 8 packs, and I think they do a little QC to help avoid the 0's and 24's especially with Hobby boxes. Has anyone beat the odds before and had a huge number of hits? I am curious, let me know! If there are any other odds you think would be fun to work out feel free to make a request!

Got hope?

Here is a very cool mathematical representation of what COULD happen over the next few months as the NHL playoffs approach. For us lowly Devils Fans (and love to Oilers Fans) we both still have a mathematical shot at making the playoffs. The Devils cannot finish higher than 3rd but there still are many permutations that exist with us finishing from 3rd to 8th.

Have fun looking up your teams! Even though the Canucks are 99% likely to make the playoffs, there IS A CHANCE, they could still end up 15th....but not likely, and I am sure you are relieved to hear that Michael!

NHL Outcomes