Same card, two companies. Different cards, two eras.

Both are cases where a simple question, which card is the rookie, has more than one answer. But the reasons are entirely different, and so is what you should do about it.

Gretzky: one card, printed twice

In 1979-80 the Great One's rookie card appeared as Topps #18 and as O-Pee-Chee #18. Same year, same number, same photograph.

O-Pee-Chee was a Canadian company that contracted with Topps to produce Topps designs for the Canadian market. It printed the cards itself rather than receiving them from Topps, which is why the physical objects differ even where the design does not.

The tells are small and consistent. The O-Pee-Chee card carries the OPC logo instead of the Topps one, has a bilingual English and French back reflecting where it was sold, is printed on whiter stock, and was cut differently. There is also a small yellow ink blemish on Gretzky's left shoulder on the OPC version that does not appear on the Topps card, which collectors have used as a quick identifier for decades.

Nobody disputes that either is a genuine rookie card. There is no authority to appeal to and no argument to settle. Both are the same player's first card, issued in the same season, by arrangement.

And yet one is worth several times the other

Here is what makes it interesting. The market does not treat them as equivalent at all.

The O-Pee-Chee commands a premium at every grade. Published sales put a PSA 9 O-Pee-Chee at around a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty thousand dollars against roughly thirty-five thousand for a Topps PSA 9. A PSA 8 O-Pee-Chee has sold just north of sixteen thousand.

At the very top the gap becomes something else entirely. Only two O-Pee-Chee examples have graded PSA 10, and one sold for $3.75 million in 2021.

Why the premium? Partly scarcity in high grade, because O-Pee-Chee's printing and cutting produced fewer clean copies. Partly that hockey's collecting heartland is Canada, and the Canadian card is the one serious hockey collectors want. It is a preference the market has settled on rather than a fact anybody established.

The consequence for a buyer is straightforward. If you want a Gretzky rookie, a graded Topps in the middle grades is by some distance the most accessible way to own one, and it is not a lesser card in any sense except what people will pay for it.

Jordan: two cards, and a genuine dispute

Jordan's situation is not the same thing at all.

The contenders are the 1984-85 Star #101 and the 1986-87 Fleer #57, and they are different cards from different years by different manufacturers. The Star card is two years earlier. The Fleer card is the one nearly everybody calls the rookie.

That is a dispute about a definition rather than a preference between two versions of one object. And it does not resolve cleanly, because the Star card's distribution was unusual enough that the hobby's authorities have never entirely agreed on how to classify it. We have written about what happened to the Star Jordan and why the grading of it matters separately.

The practical position today is that the Fleer is treated as the rookie by the market, the price guides and the registries, while the Star card is treated as something earlier and stranger that sells on its own terms.

The two most faked cards in the hobby

There is a detail that connects both stories and it is not a coincidence.

Beckett's grading operation has said that the most frequently encountered counterfeit card they see is the 1986-87 Fleer Jordan, with no fewer than a dozen different fake variations. The second most frequently encountered is the 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky.

The Topps Gretzky, by contrast, is not counterfeited on anything like the same scale, which Beckett's own expert describes as a puzzle given that fakes exist of cards worth under twenty dollars.

The pattern is clear enough. Forgers follow the premium version. Whichever card the market has decided is the important one is the card that attracts the fakes, and in both these cases the market's choice and the forgers' choice are the same.

Which is a reason to buy either of these graded rather than raw, and to be particularly careful with the O-Pee-Chee, where the difference between the valuable version and the ordinary one is a logo and a language.

What this means more generally

Three things worth taking away.

Two rookie cards is not the same as a rookie card dispute. Gretzky has two legitimate first cards and the market prefers one. Jordan has one card the market calls the rookie and another that came first. Those need different reasoning and they are constantly discussed as though they were the same problem.

The cheaper version is often the better buy for an owner rather than an investor. A Topps Gretzky in a presentable grade puts the same photograph of the same player from the same season on your shelf for a fraction of the money.

And where two versions exist, check which one you are looking at. This index files O-Pee-Chee and Topps as separate markets for exactly that reason. A listing that says only "1979 Gretzky rookie" has not told you the thing that determines most of the price.

The thing worth sitting with

The rookie card is supposed to be a simple idea: the first card of a player. It turns out to be a definition that different authorities in different decades have answered differently, and the answers determine enormous amounts of money.

Gretzky's case is settled and still produces a fourfold price difference. Jordan's is not settled at all.

This index tracks Gretzky's early cards and Jordan's in every grade and printing they appear in, kept as separate markets. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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