1981-82 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky #125 Super Action

the card

notes

This is the second Wayne Gretzky card in the 1981-82 O-Pee-Chee set, and PSA's checklist does not tell you that.

Six cards in this set carry his name. Card 106 is the regular issue. Card 125 is a Super Action card - the subset O-Pee-Chee and Topps both ran that year, showing an action photograph rather than a posed one. There is also an Oilers Leaders at 126, an Assists Leader at 383, a Scoring Leader at 384 and a Record Breaker at 392.

PSA's population report lists this one simply as Wayne Gretzky, the same as card 106. Beckett's marketplace calls it SA. So when you are buying, the card number is the only thing that reliably identifies which of the six you are getting.

The season behind it

The photograph was taken before the year that made the card worth anything. In 1981-82, the season this set covers, Gretzky scored 92 goals and 212 points - both still records - and reached fifty goals in thirty-nine games, which is also still a record. He was twenty-one.

What PSA has recorded

PSA has graded 1,553 copies of card 125 and 31 are PSA 10, a gem rate of 2.00 per cent.

Against his other cards in the same set that is comfortably mid-range. The regular issue at 106 gems at 0.89 per cent, and the Scoring Leader at 384 does 0.61 - three tens in 491 copies, which makes it the hardest Gretzky in the set by a distance. The Oilers Leaders at 126 is the easiest at 3.36.

Across all 396 cards, this one ranks thirty-fifth from the hardest. It is not a difficult card by the standards of the set. What it is is a Gretzky.

The population piles up at PSA 8 with 451 copies and thins from there - 207 at 9, 31 at 10.

Beckett reports a gem rate of 16.8 per cent, and the truth is more interesting

That headline is the highest figure this site has encountered, and like every Beckett gem rate it combines two different grades. Beckett has recorded 232 copies of this card: five are Pristine 10 and thirty-four more are 9.5.

Tens against tens, Beckett has awarded 2.16 per cent against PSA's 2.00. The two companies are within a fifth of a point of each other, and Beckett is fractionally the looser of the two.

That is worth saying because it is not what this site usually finds. On the 1986-87 Fleer Ewing Beckett has awarded one ten in 2,193 copies against PSA's 162 in 9,921, and on the Chris Mullin one in 1,107 against PSA's 112 in 6,222. On both of those PSA is twenty to thirty times likelier to award a ten.

Here they agree. The headline rate misleads on all three cards, but it misleads by different amounts and in different directions, which means there is no rule of thumb to apply - only the actual split, card by card.

SGC has 179 copies with one ten. CGC has 32 and none.

The sales say something the rates do not

Four sales are on record, and two pairs of them are worth putting side by side.

A Beckett 9.5 sold at Goldin for $733 in May 2025. A PSA 9 sold at Heritage for $732 in September 2026. One dollar apart, sixteen months apart, on two different scales at two different houses.

And at the top the order reverses. A PSA 10 made $3,240 at Heritage in July 2024. A Beckett 10 made $5,400 at Fanatics Collect in July 2026 - the highest figure recorded for this card, and two thirds more than the PSA 10 managed two years earlier.

Two years is long enough that the gap is not purely about the holder. But the supply explains a good deal of it: five Beckett tens exist against PSA's thirty-one. It is the second card on this site where a Beckett 10 has outsold every PSA 10 on record, the other being the 1980-81 Mark Messier, and in both cases the scarcer ceiling is Beckett's.

The set is at 1981-82 O-Pee-Chee.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 26 sep 2026. figures are a snapshot on that date, not a live count.

recorded sales

dated past results, not an estimate of what a copy is worth today. figures published by an auction house normally include the buyer's premium, so they are more than the seller received.

where to buy one

Check the card number before anything else. Six cards in this set are Gretzky, PSA's checklist calls two of them simply Wayne Gretzky, and they do not trade alike.

PSA 8 is where this card is bought. There are 451 of them and it is the largest grade in the population.

PSA 9, at 207 copies, has one public sale on record at $732 and is the sensible stretch.

PSA 10 has 31 copies and one recorded sale at $3,240. A Beckett 10 made $5,400 two years later, so do not assume PSA is automatically the dearer holder on this card.

Treat Beckett's 16.8 per cent gem rate with suspicion. It is five Pristine 10s and thirty-four cards at 9.5 added together. Five Beckett tens exist against thirty-one PSA 10s, so the Beckett ceiling is the scarcer of the two.

If you want the hardest Gretzky in this set rather than the best known, it is the Scoring Leader at 384 - three PSA 10s in 491 copies. It costs a fraction of the regular issue.

Expect rough cutting. O-Pee-Chee's edges in this period would be called damage on an American card and are usually how the Canadian card left the factory.

what to check before you buy

Read the card number on the label, not the player name. PSA lists both 106 and 125 as Wayne Gretzky and they are different cards.

Check the photograph. The Super Action card shows an action shot; the regular issue at 106 is a posed portrait against the boards.

Check centring on both sides, and look along all four edges for O-Pee-Chee's rough cut. It is original to the printing rather than handling, but it still caps the grade.

Confirm the back is bilingual. O-Pee-Chee prints English and French. Topps ran a regional East and West split that year covering cards 67 to 132, so a Topps card in this number range exists in two versions and O-Pee-Chee's does not.

If the label says Beckett, read the number rather than the word gem. Pristine 10 and 9.5 are different cards at different prices and published gem rates combine them.

sources