CARDBOARDFILE
Three ways the packaging ruined its own contents, and the antitrust ruling that accidentally put a stop to one of them.
09 sep 2026
The packaging was designed to sell gum. Protecting the cards was never the point, and for about forty years it did the opposite.
I want to go through the three ways a card got damaged before anyone bought it, because all three show up in the population reports on this site and none of them is anybody's fault in the way collectors usually mean.
The wrapper was wax paper. Wax migrates, and the cards it migrates into are the ones touching the wrapper - the top and the bottom of the stack.
It shows as a dull yellow or brown patch, usually along an edge or a corner, and it is not dirt. Over decades it soaks into porous cardstock and stops being a surface problem. Graders treat it as one: light residue costs about a grade, heavy staining about two, and wax that has gone into the stock can cost three or more.
You cannot fix it. Light surface wax will sometimes come off with a soft cloth, and anything more aggressive than that is card doctoring, which is a different and worse problem.
The gum was a slab, and it sat against the top card of the pack.
Sugar and moisture do to cardboard what you would expect. Collectors opening late-1970s and early-1980s packs report gum that has bled through two or three cards, not just the one it touched, and packs stored warm are worse than packs stored cool. The damage is still progressing in sealed packs today, which is part of what you are gambling on when you buy one.
A pack held twelve cards, one sticker and a stick of gum, for about thirty-five cents.
The gum sat against the top card, face up. And the cards were collated in a fixed sequence off an eleven-by-twelve press sheet, running in two parallel reverse-alphabetical streams sixty-six cards apart - which is why experienced buyers could work out a good deal about what was inside a pack before paying for it.
So on this set the gum did not damage a random card. It damaged whichever card the collation put at the top, every time, in every pack.
That is worth holding next to what the population report says. The Jordan at 57 gems at 1.19 per cent, the Wilkins at 121 at 1.20 and the Bird at 9 at 1.50, while the Magic at 53 manages 2.34. Sheet position and collation are the usual explanation offered for spreads like that. Nobody has published a map of where each card sat, so it stays an explanation rather than a finding - but the mechanism is real and it was systematic.
The eleven 1986-87 Fleer stickers came one to a pack, and the gum sat against them. Authentic copies routinely carry residue or staining on the back, and that is original to the packaging rather than something a child did afterwards.
The same thing happened in 1977. A Topps Star Wars pack held seven cards, one sticker and a stick of gum for fifteen cents. Gum against the sticker, wax against the card at the back. A sealed pack reliably ruined two of the eight things inside it before anyone opened it.
Star Company did not use wax packs at all. Its cards went out in sealed polybags, one team to a bag, through a small network of dealers.
No gum, no wax - and a worse outcome for one card in particular. A polybag has no rigidity, so twelve cards slide against each other. And the card facing outward through the plastic took every bit of handling the bag received in a dealer's box or at a show.
For the Chicago Bulls bag that card was Michael Jordan at 101. PSA has recorded 576 copies and not one is a 10. Neither has Beckett, from 1,281. Nor CGC. Across four companies and nearly two thousand graded copies, nobody has ever awarded that card a 10.
The 1977 Argentine Star Wars issue came with an album to paste the cards into. That was the intended use.
A card glued down and later lifted out is not a card that grades. PSA has recorded 1,317 copies across all 68 cards, awarded no 10 to anything in the set, and three 9s. The most common grade is a 4.
Gum left the packs for legal reasons, not because anyone cared about condition.
Topps' player contracts gave it exclusive rights to sell cards alone or together with gum, candy and confection. Fleer sued, won at district court in 1980, and lost on appeal in August 1981. Fleer and Donruss both issued cards in 1981 with gum in the packs.
Then Fleer's lawyers found the gap. Topps' exclusivity covered cards sold alone or with confectionery - so cards sold with something else were outside it. From 1982 Donruss dropped the gum and added Babe Ruth puzzle pieces; Fleer dropped it and added team logo stickers. Topps called both a sham. The loophole survived until 1992.
Nobody in that litigation was arguing about wax stains. The industry stopped putting gum against cardboard because of an antitrust ruling, and card condition improved as a side effect.
Compare the sets on this site across that arc.
The four 1948-49 Leaf cards here have 10,175 graded copies between them across four grading companies, and not one has ever been awarded a 10. The 1986 Fleer cards gem between one and three per cent. The base cards of 2000 Topps Chrome Allegiance, machine cut on stiff stock and sold in foil, come back PSA 10 fifty-seven per cent of the time.
Some of that is better printing and better cutting. But a good part of it is simply that by 2000 nobody was packing a slab of sugar against the front card and wrapping the stack in wax.