In May 1995, Trading Cards Magazine ran a piece by Jim Stevens asking which hockey cards were worth buying with $500. I thought it’d be fun to see how John Moore’s picks have held up!
You can see that Moore recommended: One Ken Dryden 1971-72 OPC RC #45, $300; one Patrick Roy 1986-87 OPC RC #53, $140; two Dale Hawerchuk 1982-83 OPC RCs #380, $36; and four Paul Kariya 1992-93 UD RCs #586, $24. Total expense: $500.
Let’s assume he was talking about cards that would grade PSA 8s, which is a bit optimistic, but I need to compare against something.
It looks like Ken Dryden’s PSA 8 RC’s are ~$1475, Roy PSA 8 rookies are ~$330, Hawerchuk’s RC is ~$40 (times two is $80), and Paul Kariya’s UD RC is essentially worthless in a PSA 8 slab. So combined, that’s $1,885 from the original $500. But just a moment, the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator says that $500 in May 1995 has the same purchasing power as $1,043.60 in January 2025.
Not bad by Moore overall. But everyone probably should have stuck to Gretzky’s rookie cards, eh?
The 66-card 1961 Topps hockey set isn’t as noteworthy as it probably should be in the hobby. Only 47 active 1961 Topps hockey sets are in the current PSA Set Registry, making it one of the least collected vintage hockey sets. While the set only features players from the Boston Bruins, Chicago Blackhawks, and New York Rangers, plus a checklist (Parkhurst had the rights to players from the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, and Detroit Red Wings), the reality is that Topps did a lot of things for the first time in this release that helped define the hobby.
1961 Topps #29 Bobby Hull – Front
1961 Topps #29 Bobby Hull – Reverse
First, while OPC produced the set under the Topps license, the cards, wrappers, and boxes had “O-Pee-Chee” and “Made in Canada” printed on them for the first time.
1961 Topps Hockey Wrapper
1961 Topps was also the first hockey set that had a premium placed in the packs. Each came with four cards, a piece of gum, and a pair of stamps.
1961 Topps Stamp Panels Howie Morenz Frank Nighbor
As a lifelong checklist collector, I’d be scolded if I failed to mention that Topps included a checklist for the first time in a hockey set in 1961, too.
1961 Topps #66 Checklist 1-66
1961 Topps Hockey is also the first set to feature team cards, coaches cards, and rookie card designations on the front of cards (though not for every rookie).
1961 Topps #63 New York Rangers
1961 Topps #24 Rudy Pilous
1961 Topps #60 Jean Ratelle
The Bruins team card also marked Willie O’Ree’s first appearance on a hockey card. He was the first African-Canadian player to compete in the NHL.
1961 Topps #20 Boston Bruins
Here’s more information about this hobby-defining set if you want to collect it.
While Topps featured three teams, the Rangers cards are the key to the set as three of the four most challenging cards in the set are cards 63 (New York Rangers), 64 (Action Picture – D. Meissner/G. Worsley), and 65 (Action Picture – Gump Worsley). There are no PSA 10s between those three cards and only 2 PSA 9s (both of card 65). The other tough high-grade card is card 66, Checklist 1-66, with zero PSA 10s and 2 PSA 9s in the population report.
From a price guide perspective, the cards that will set you back the most are Cards 1 (Phil Watson), 22 (Bathgate, Hall in Action), 29 (Bobby Hull), 36 (Stank Mikita), 60 (Jean Ratelle), 62 (Rod Gilbert), and the low pop cards I discussed earlier.
Raw sets come to market from time to time. This higher-grade example sold for $2218 in September 2021.
1961 Topps Hockey Complete Set
The pictured mid-grade set below sold for $1082 in September 2021.
1961 Topps Hockey Complete Set
The Stamps are a little more expensive. Four years ago, in their Spring 2017 auction, Robert Edward Auctions sold a complete 26-panel, 52-stamp set for $1080.
1961 Topps Hockey Stamp Panels
Topps packed a lot of innovation and incredible imagery into their 1961 hockey release. Its small size makes collecting it a little more achievable if you like collecting graded sets with just enough scarcity in high-grade to make it challenging for condition-conscious collectors.
If you decide to tackle this iconic set, let me know your progress in the comments. Happy collecting!
Love ’em or hate ’em, you definitely have an opinion about the faux wood grain bordered cards; they’re pretty unforgettable. In this article, I’ll run down a few details about five key wood grain framed sports card sets in the hobby and share a few thoughts about them.
1955 Bowman Baseball
1955 Bowman #202 Mickey Mantle
The first faux wood-grained border set was Bowman’s final vintage postwar set. I consider it the first bold design choice that Topps or Bowman made with the horizontal color television set style (inspired by the 1950 Drake’s cards). Most real TVs at the time had a wood-grain paneled look. The first 64 cards have a lighter wood grain within the set, and the rest are darker.
The look of these cards is incredibly recognizable, show one to a vintage collector, and they KNOW it’s a 1955 Bowman card. Sports Collector’s Digest once wrote in an interview that “if collectors mention the set they hate from the ’50s the most, the 1955 Bowman set is the one that’s mentioned probably 80-85 percent of the time.” I don’t hate ANY sports card set, but I probably fit more in the group that isn’t a fan of this design than the group who loves it; it’s just a little tacky/cheesy; perhaps I’m just too young to appreciate them!
It’s also weird that the card fronts don’t show the player’s first name, team name, or position. However, Bowman’s last set is still important to the hobby. So, I think the best way to summarize the set is something I once heard during a hobby chat: the cards are ugly but historic. I do applaud Bowman for trying to do something different.
1962 Topps Baseball
1962 Topps Baseball #387 Lou Brock
The next major release to use a faux wood grain background was Topps’s 1962 baseball set. This time, they made the image look like a sticker peeling away from the wood background, revealing the player’s name, team, and position.
The look of the wood seems a bit more “elegant” this time. Some say they are inspired by the 1955 Bowman design, but Topps did the design in a way that works a lot better to me. The vertical orientation, the move away from the television screen, and additional player information on the front make a complete design. It’s still not the most attractive design Topps has made, but it’s nicer than the 1955 Bowman set.
From a collector’s perspective, the edges in this set show chipping, so, just like the 1955 Bowmans, the cards are tough to find in better condition.
1966 Topps Football and Hockey
1966 Topps Football #96 Joe Namath
1966 Topps Hockey #35 Bobby Orr
The 1966 Topps Hockey and Football sets have the same color TV-based design of a player’s photo within a faux wood grain border with the player’s name, position, and team printed along the bottom of the horizontally aligned card. They’re just as polarizing as the other sets I mentioned.
The hockey card images are imposed in front of a game crowd, which I think looks pretty cool. The football cards seem to have either the background from where the photo was taken (likely a practice field and usually of the sky) or a pure red or yellow background.
Color TV was still new in 1966, so the cards were probably pretty appropriate for the time. Also, the hockey cards have a TV shape on the back (white text on a black background shipped like an oval TV).
1987 Topps Baseball
1987 Topps Baseball #320 Barry Bonds
I think the 1987 Topps Baseball set pulled off the wood grain border the best. The frame looks like a baseball bat and fits the era well. Therefore, it’s one of the most recognizable sets from the 1980s.
The box around the player’s name, the black texted Topps logo, and the team logo in the upper circle look great from a design perspective. It’s the cleanest of these designs, so I’m a big fan.
As I said in the intro, these wood grain-bordered cards definitely elicit a reaction and opinion from collectors, so I’d love to hear what you think about them in the comments.
Happy collecting!
PS: In writing this article, I considered including the 1958 Hires Root Beer set but wanted to concentrate on major releases.
Even in 1995, collectors looked back at old card prices and wondered, “What if?” Jon Brecka dives into one such case in Trading Cards Magazine (May 1995) with “Just How Great Are Gretzky’s Rookie Cards?”
The 1979 OPC Hockey set is a landmark release in the hobby, largely due to the iconic Wayne Gretzky rookie card. But the set is incredible for a few other reasons. In this piece, I’ll highlight some of them while saving a detailed analysis of Gretzky’s #18 rookie for another time.
1979 OPC #18 Wayne Gretzky
First, the 1979 OPC design is sharp! They moved from a white border design to the now-iconic blue-bordered design.
However, while they look incredible, those blue borders are condition-sensitive and prone to chipping. The cards are also tough to find centered. The rough cut edges are typical for O-Pee-Chee cards, and while they don’t detract from the grading of cards, they can turn off certain collectors.
The bilingual backs have 1978-79 statistics, a biography, and a cartoon sharing a fun fact about the player.
1979 OPC #170 Gainey – Reverse
Next, the set debuted four new NHL clubs in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Quebec, and Hartford. These team cards and checklist emblems (logo cards) are some of the most expensive cards in the set.
1979 OPC #261 Nordiques Team
The set is also famous for having the last cards of Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and Ken Dryden. Howe was still playing pro hockey at 51, so this set demonstrates the torch passing from Howe to the 19-year-old Gretzky.
1979 OPC #175 Gordie Howe
1979 OPC #185 Bobby Hull
1979 OPC #155 Stan Mikita
1979 OPC #150 Ken Dryden
As is standard with older hockey releases, the checklists are particularly expensive. This set includes three: #131, #237, and #346.
1979 OPC #237 Checklist #133-264
Unfortunately, wax packs are selling for a little more than the 20 cents they sold for when released in 1979. Graded wax packs are multi-thousand-dollar collectibles; REA sold a PSA 9 in the spring of 2024 for just over $3k.
1979 OPC Hockey Wax Pack
Wax boxes, which hold 48 packs, are proportionally expensive; each pack has 14 cards, which means you will get 672 total cards in a box. With a 396-card checklist, you have a good chance of pulling multiple Gretzky (or any other) cards. But remember, the cards are condition-sensitive; most won’t even be PSA 7 quality out of the pack.
1979 OPC Hockey Wax Box
Uncut sheets come to market from time to time as well. Robert Edward Auctions sold this complete set of 1979 O-Pee-Chee hockey cards on three uncut sheets (which obviously included the Gretzky rookie) for just over $20k in their spring 2019 auction. Sheets without the Gretzky rookie are significantly cheaper.
1979 OPC Hockey Complete Set on 3 Uncut Sheets
While the Gretzky card still dominates the public’s perception of the 1979 OPC Hockey set, as it should, the set has many other great features. Happy collecting!
Variety is the spice of life, and Topps definitely mixed things up with the introduction of tall boy sized cards with their 1964 Hockey set. The cards must have been pretty popular because the following year, in 1965, they released tall boy football cards to stand out against their competition. Then, when they decided to re-enter the basketball card market, their 1969 release was, once again, of the tall boy variety. In this article, I’ll run down these three incredibly popular sets.
1964 Topps Hockey
1964 Topps Hockey #20 Bobby Hull
The first year that Topps didn’t have to compete with Parkhurst in the hockey card market, they released their set in a tall boy format (2-1/2″ x 4-11/16″) for the first time in any sport. From a historical perspective, some collectors think going with larger cards (Topps printed “GIANT SIZE” on the wrappers) was a “triumphalist call,” but no one knows for sure.
1964 Topps Hockey Wrapper
The set has 110 cards of players from all 6 NHL teams and was the first set in 10 years that included all the teams. The set is nearly double the size of previous Topps hockey sets and was released over two series. Hockey collectors consider 1964 Topps to be one of the greatest hockey sets of all time, and it’s the toughest of these three tall boy sets to complete in high grade.
1964 Topps Hockey #55 Second Checklist
1965 Topps Football
The football market in 1965 was a little different than the hockey market. Philadelphia Gum had the rights to the NFL’s licensing for cards, so Topps, to expand its AFL release (less interesting content) and compete for sales, released their set in the tall boy format to stand out. Remember, the larger size format worked with 1952 Topps baseball in competition with Bowman too.
The 176 card set would end up being the only football card tall boy set Topps made. Maybe tall boys were too expensive to print/machine? It does, however, feature one of the most recognizable football cards in the hobby, Joe Namath’s card #122.
1965 Topps Football #122 Joe Namath
Topps knew they didn’t have the best content because the packs didn’t advertise the AFL specifically, just “Pro Football.”
1965 Topps Football Wrapper
1969 Topps Basketball
Topps returned to the basketball card market in 1969 with their 99-card set. Again, Topps must have been trying to make a splash and have the cards stand out on shelves with their larger size as “10 GIANT CARDS” was printed on the wax boxes.
1969 Topps Basketball Wax Box
1969 Topps basketball is loaded with stars enhancing its popularity. But you may not know that Topps couldn’t use team logos on the cards due to licensing issues, so some players posed for photos wearing their jerseys backward. Still, it’s an incredibly eye-appealing set due to the tall boy format and choice of colors.
1969 Topps Basketball #20 John Havlicek
Topps did follow up the 1969 Topps basketball set with another tall boy set in 1970, but they never did publish a baseball tall boy set (1964 Topps Giant-Size All-Stars being the closest we have). The drawback of the tall boy format is that the cards’ size makes them more condition sensitive since they were tougher to store and more prone to miscuts in the factory.
Regardless of your desire to collect high-end cards or not, a trio of all three original tall boy sets would be a great addition to anyone’s vintage card collection. Let me know down in the comments which is your favorite, and happy collecting!
After dedicating a lot of time exploring early ’90s baseball autograph insert sets, I decided to broaden my horizons a bit and delve into the world of hockey insert cards from the same era. In doing so, I stumbled upon two really attractive sets: the 1993-94 Donruss Elite and the 1994-95 Donruss Elite insert sets. The 15 1993 and 10 1994 insert cards are limited to just 10,000 copies each, and the latter set boasts a distinctive deckle edge design reminiscent of the iconic Topps baseball cards from 1969!
1969 Topps Deckle Edge #21 Pete Rose
1993-94 Donruss Elite Inserts
The 15 NHL superstar Donruss Elite cards were random inserts in two different Donruss packs. Cards 1-10 were Series 1 inserts, while U1-U5 were included in Elite Update packs. As I wrote in the intro, they’re all numbered to 10k. In their promotional material for the set, Donruss included the Teemu Selanne card but didn’t highlight any set details.
1993 Donruss Hockey Advertisement
The fronts of the cards have a color photo of an NHL start in a diamond with prism foil borders around it. The player’s name is printed at the bottom. The back features a card number out of 10, a serial number out of 10000, a headshot, and career highlights against a marble background with silver borders. I’ve read that the insert ratio was ~1:60 packs.
1993 Donruss Elite #4 Eric Lindros
Here’s the set’s checklist:
1. Mario Lemieux
2. Alexandre Daigle
3. Teemu Selanne
4. Eric Lindros
5. Brett Hull
6. Jeremy Roenick
7. Doug Gilmour
8. Alexander Mogilny
9. Patrick Roy
10. Wayne Gretzky
U1. Mikael Renberg
U2. Sergei Fedorov
U3. Felix Potvin
U4. Cam Neely
U5. Alexei Yashin
1993 Donruss Elite Complete Set
PSA has graded just over 250 examples, including 106 Gretzky, 45 Lemieux, and 29 Roy cards. A PSA 8 Gretzky sold for $37 in January 2025, and a PSA 10 Lemieux went for $285 in February 2021.
1993 Donruss Elite #10 Wayne Gretzky
1994-95 Donruss Elite Inserts
In 1994, Donruss limited the Elite Inserts to ten and only included them in Series 1 packs. Again, only 10k of each were made. This time, however, the insertion rate was 1:72 packs. Donruss had the Jeremy Roenick card on its promotional material, but no other details were included in the piece I found.
1994 Donruss Hockey Advertisement
I sort of wish Donruss had stuck with the design of the 1993 set but included the deckle cut as they did in 1994. For this series, the cards featured a rectangular player image on the front, surrounded by a silver foil deckle edge. The player’s name matching the silver foil border is an excellent integration. The back features the serial number out of 10,000 along the top with the card number, a rectangular photo, and some player information below it.
1994 Donruss Elite #10 Patrick Roy
Here’s the set’s checklist:
1. Jason Arnott
2. Martin Brodeur
3. Pavel Bure
4. Sergei Fedorov
5. Wayne Gretzky
6. Mario Lemieux
7. Eric Lindros
8. Felix Potvin
9. Jeremy Roenick
10. Patrick Roy
1994 Donruss Elite #6 Mario Lemieux
PSA has graded a little over 300 of these cards, including 109 of Gretzky, 55 of Lemieux, 32 of Roy, and 28 of Brodeur. PSA 10 Gretzky’s have sold for between $157 (July 2021) and $293 (January 2025) in the past few years, and one collector has managed a complete PSA 10 graded set on the registry.
1994 Donruss Elite #5 Wayne Gretzky
Conclusion
As you can see in the hockey card category of my archives, they aren’t my usual territory, but I’m eager to expand my knowledge and explore them further. While my expertise primarily lies in baseball cards, the 1993-94 and 1994-95 Donruss Elite hockey sets are really alluring, with the latter’s design harking back to one of my favorite deckle designs of the late ’60s. Stay tuned for more discoveries and insights as I continue my quest to learn more about hockey collectibles!
