how many Gretzky Rookies were made

[justme007]

topps and opc, both- anyone know how many were produced...

[30ranfordfan]

I would assume 10s of thousands.... like more than 100k.

[justme007]

ok thx, wonder how many gretz rc's per wax box....

[30ranfordfan]

48 packs per box, and 14 cards per pack = 672 cards.

There's 396 cards in the set - so assuming random distribution, you should see 1 or 2 of any particular card in any box (the average would be 1.7 copies of any particular card..... so I'd expect that you'd get at least one Gretzky per box, and if you had 10 boxes.... you'd find that 7 of them had 2)

That's just using simple math - as all of those cards SHOULD have the same print run. It's possible that some cards are double printed though... I don't remember if 79-80 has that issue for some cards or not.


Topps, with only 264 cards in the set, the chances of a Gretzky are even higher. You should average 2.5 per box... numbers should it should take two boxes to (roughly) complete 5 sets.

ok thx, wonder how many gretz rc's per wax box....

[jcesar77]

Topps had fewer packs / box --

1979/80 Topps Hockey Wax Box. 36 packs. 10 cards per pack plus one sticker card, so 360/264 on average per each card in set

[pwaldo]

If you want to find the answer get the numbers for something that will be easier to obtain (something like baseball) and just work it over to hockey. There are actual hard numbers in baseball for a handful of years but if you chart them out and can get any solid numbers for one hockey year you can get a pretty good educated guess for Gretzky's year. For OPC you just figure out the Topps and then find if they made more or less of the OPC and go from there.