CARDBOARDFILE
hockey / O-Pee-Chee
396 cards
The 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee set runs to 396 cards and is the most consequential hockey issue the company ever printed, for one reason above all others: card 18 is Wayne Gretzky's rookie card.
It is also the first post-WHA set. The World Hockey Association folded after the 1978-79 season and four of its clubs were absorbed into the NHL, so the Edmonton Oilers, Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques and Winnipeg Jets appear here as NHL teams for the first time.
At the other end of the same checklist, this is the last card for several players whose careers reached back decades. Gordie Howe at 175, Bobby Hull at 185 and Ken Dryden at 150 all appear for the final time, as does Stan Mikita. A set that opens with a 19-year-old rookie and closes the book on Howe is a real changing of the guard, and it happened by accident of timing.
The design puts the photo inside a blue border, with the player and team name above and a team logo in the bottom right. Backs are bilingual, English and French, carrying 1978-79 and career statistics, a short biography and a cartoon fact. The first eight cards are the previous season's league leaders, record breakers sit at 161 through 165, card 83 recaps the Stanley Cup final, and the team cards at 244 through 261 have checklist backs.
Those blue borders are why the set has the reputation it does. Blue chips. Any handling shows on the edge as a white speck, and print quality out of London was inconsistent to begin with. High grades are scarce across the whole checklist, not only on the Gretzky.
The Topps relationship explains what you are actually looking at. O-Pee-Chee was a London, Ontario confectionery company founded in 1911, its name the Ojibwe word for robin, and from 1958 it printed and distributed Topps designs for the Canadian market. Topps issued its own 1979-80 hockey set of 264 cards. The first 264 O-Pee-Chee cards match it, with the exception of numbers 81, 82, 141, 163 and 263. The remaining 132 cards were Canada only.
Complete sets turn up regularly, and so do partial sets and singles. What you buy depends on whether you want the Gretzky.
A complete 396-card set with the Gretzky in it is priced almost entirely by the condition of that one card. The other 395 are common. If you want the set as a set, look for one where the Gretzky is graded separately and the balance is described honestly, rather than a raw set sold on an overall grade estimate.
If you want the run without the key card, ask for a 395-card set. They exist, they cost a fraction of the price, and they are the sensible way to build this set if the Gretzky is a separate project.
Two things to check on any purchase here. First, the copyright line: an O-Pee-Chee card says Printed in Canada on the back, and the Topps card of the same player at the same number says printed in the USA. They are different cards at different prices and sellers mix them up constantly. Second, the Gretzky specifically has been illegally reprinted. Most reprints were destroyed or marked as reprints, but unmarked ones survive and they are hard to tell from the real card. For that one, graded is the only sensible way to buy.