A candy company, a dull cut, and a blue border

One in six thousand, near enough. For comparison, the 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie has produced more than three hundred perfect copies. A Jordan submission is something like fifty times more likely to come back a ten than a Gretzky is.

That is not because Canadians were harder on their cards. It is because of how the thing was made.

O-Pee-Chee never printed a card in its life

This is the part almost every account gets wrong, including ones that should know better. O-Pee-Chee was a candy company. It made gum. The cards were printed by Lawson & Jones, a commercial printer in London, Ontario, working to a licence O-Pee-Chee held from Topps.

So when you read about O-Pee-Chee's printing problems, what is actually being described is a Canadian job shop running an American design on equipment that was not really up to it, for a market a fraction of the size.

Nobody agrees how the cards were cut

Here is where I have to be careful, because the hobby states this with more confidence than the evidence supports.

The common account is wires. Sheets were stacked, something like a hundred deep, and cut with wire rather than a blade, which is why the edges came out fibrous and why so many cards sit off centre: a stack that tall shifts while it is being cut.

But a former plant manager, quoted in one of the more careful pieces written about this card, says it was a dull blade set up in the basement of the gum works. Not wire at all.

I cannot resolve that and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What matters is that both accounts describe the same damage, and the damage is what shows up in the population report.

The blue border is the real villain

If you want one reason for the two, it is this.

The design puts a solid blue border right to the edge of the card. Any colour that bleeds off the edge shows wear the instant anything touches it, because there is no white margin to hide behind. A white-bordered card can take a small knock and still look clean. A blue one cannot.

Add a lighter cardstock than the American Topps version, add centering that was often nowhere near, add print dots and white specks in the background, and you have a card that was already fighting before a nine-year-old put it in his pocket.

The Topps version of the same card, printed properly in the United States, is meaningfully easier to find in high grade. Same photograph, same number, same player. Different factory.

What a rough cut actually proves

Now the part that will annoy people.

You will be told, often and confidently, that a rough fibrous edge proves a card is genuine, because a modern fake cut from a sheet would have clean edges. It is repeated as though it settles the question.

It does not. A dealer on the Collectors Universe boards described faking it in a single sentence: a quick touch of sandpaper on a sheet-cut card, just enough to convince a grader it did not come off a sheet. And uncut sheets are not rare. A printer's son was carrying them out of Lawson & Jones as gifts in 1979.

So a rough cut is consistent with a real card. It is not proof of one. Those are different claims, and only the weaker one is true.

The blue lines on the back

Same problem, different myth.

Some copies show blue print lines on the reverse, and the hobby has decided these mark a first print run, which makes them special. I went looking for the evidence and could not find any. Nobody has shown the lines came early rather than late in the run. Nobody has shown they are scarcer. It is a belief that circulates because it circulates.

It may well be true. That is not the same as it being established, and a card this expensive deserves the distinction.

What you can actually check

The one reliable thing that separates the Canadian card from the American one is a small yellow print dot on Gretzky's left shoulder, and the bilingual English and French text on the back. That is an O-Pee-Chee tell, not an authenticity tell, but it is at least a fact about the object rather than a story about it.

Beyond that, the honest advice is the boring advice: buy the holder, not the card. On a card where a perfect example has changed hands for millions and a modern forgery costs a few hundred to produce, the grading fee is the cheapest part of the transaction.

Where the market actually is

The two tens are not really cards any more. They are assets that surface every few years, and the 2016, 2020 and 2021 sales each set a record for a hockey card by a wide margin.

The ninety-five PSA 9s are where the top of this market genuinely transacts. That is the highest grade a serious collector can realistically pursue, and the step down from nine to eight, where the population is nearly nine times larger, is where the price cliff sits.

Which is the useful way to read any population report. The rarest grade is not the interesting number. The interesting number is the one where scarcity and availability cross, and on this card that is a nine.

We track the PSA 9 and every other grade of Gretzky's first three seasons, including the Topps version of this same card. You can read how we work the numbers out, and there is a note on the PSA 9 page about why that grade carries the weight it does.