The Scarcer Luke Skywalker Sold for Half as Much, in the Same Auction

On 5 May 2026 Heritage closed a Star Wars auction that put the same photograph on the block twice.

Lot 98001 was the 1977 Topps Luke Skywalker, card 1, in PSA 10. It made $687,500, which is the most anyone has paid for a Star Wars card.

Three lots later came the O-Pee-Chee version of card 1 - same picture, same blue starfield border, same grade, same afternoon, same bidders in the room. It made $375,000.

PSA has graded 5,252 copies of the Topps card and 186 of the O-Pee-Chee. The card that is twenty-eight times scarcer sold for fifty-five per cent of the price.

I cannot think of a cleaner test. Everything that usually muddies a comparison - the date, the venue, the grade, the condition of the specific copy, who happened to be bidding - was held constant by accident. Only the country of issue differed, and the money ran opposite to the supply.

The same experiment in hockey, pointing the other way

Now take the two versions of the 1979-80 Wayne Gretzky, card 18 in both.

PSA has graded 13,584 copies of the O-Pee-Chee and, on the published secondary figures, somewhere around 11,500 of the Topps. The O-Pee-Chee is the commoner of the two in holders, not the scarcer.

In June 2025 both sold at comparable grades:

• O-Pee-Chee PSA 9: $138,470. Topps PSA 9: $24,001
• O-Pee-Chee PSA 8: $15,250. Topps PSA 8: $4,950

Five to six times the money at PSA 9, three times at PSA 8, for the more plentiful card.

So in Star Wars the scarcer issue is worth less and in hockey the commoner issue is worth more. Population gets it wrong twice, in opposite directions, on the same pair of companies.

What is actually being paid for

The variable that survives both tests is which issue the people buying treat as the real one.

Star Wars cards are an American market. Topps made the set, the set is the reference, and the O-Pee-Chee is understood as the Canadian edition of it - a variant, however scarce. Hockey is the reverse. The people who care most about a 1979-80 Gretzky are the people who grew up buying hockey cards in Canada, where O-Pee-Chee was not the alternative to anything. It was the card.

Gretzky played in Edmonton. Luke Skywalker opened in Hollywood. The premium follows the audience, not the census.

That sounds obvious written down. It is not how scarcity gets talked about in this hobby, where a low population number is treated as a reason for a price rather than a fact that may or may not have a buyer attached to it.

A complication that matters

There is a real scarcity argument for the O-Pee-Chee Gretzky, and it is worth separating from the one that fails.

O-Pee-Chee cut its cards on cruder equipment than Topps, and the published figures put roughly nine per cent of O-Pee-Chee submissions at PSA 8 or better against about eighteen per cent for Topps. So while there are more O-Pee-Chee copies in holders, there are fewer good ones. A former plant manager, Ken McAvoy, put it plainly: quality was not the number one priority back then.

That is condition scarcity rather than print scarcity, and it is a real part of the price.

But notice what it does not explain. The same company cut the Star Wars cards the same way, and our own figures show it. Across the sixty-six cards of the O-Pee-Chee first series, 4.31 per cent of recorded copies carry a qualifier against 1.71 per cent on the Topps series, and the gem rate is 1.02 per cent against 2.33. Worse cutting, worse centring, fewer tens - the identical production signature, in the identical set, from the identical blade.

In hockey that gets paid for. In Star Wars it does not. Condition scarcity only turns into money when the audience already wants that issue; on its own it just means the card is harder to find nice.

The set-level version

The single-card comparison holds across the whole series.

The O-Pee-Chee first series has 2,550 graded copies against the Topps series' 50,881, and 26 PSA 10s against 1,188. Twenty times scarcer, and forty-six times fewer tens. Forty-two of its sixty-six cards have never been awarded a ten at all, where every Topps card has at least one.

If scarcity set prices, a graded run of the Canadian series would be one of the most expensive projects in non-sport cards. It is not. Away from card 1 it is one of the cheaper ones.

Where this leaves the usual argument

We looked at the other end of this question in are the 1977 Argentina Star Wars cards rare, or just ungraded. That set has 1,317 graded copies across 68 cards and not a single PSA 10 anywhere in it - roughly one graded copy for every thirty-nine of the Topps series. The conclusion there was that nobody can say whether the cards are scarce, because a population report counts submissions rather than survivors, and no print or distribution figures exist.

Put the two articles together and you get something more useful than either.

Where scarcity cannot be measured, it cannot support a price claim. And where it can be measured, as it can here, it still does not predict the price. The O-Pee-Chee Luke is one of the scarcest cards in graded Star Wars, with a population of 186 and two tens, and it sold for a little over half what a card with 5,252 copies made in the same sale.

None of which says the O-Pee-Chee Luke is cheap or dear. Three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars is a serious result for a card almost nobody outside Canada knew existed. It says that if you are reaching for a population number to explain what something is worth, you need a second sentence about who wants it - and that the second sentence is doing most of the work.

A note on the evidence

The two Star Wars figures are from Heritage lot pages in the same auction, read signed in, and both include the buyer's premium.

The Gretzky sale figures are secondary. They come from published price research rather than from lot pages we have read ourselves, which is a weaker class of evidence than this site normally prints, and they are used here because they are same-month pairs at matching grades rather than because of their precision. The Topps Gretzky population is secondary for the same reason. The O-Pee-Chee Gretzky population, and every Star Wars population figure in this article, is from our own reading of the PSA report.

The nine and eighteen per cent high-grade rates for the two hockey issues are published figures we have not independently reproduced.

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