Hockey Card Collecting Question

[Buckeyes]

Does any hockey card collector consider cards serial numbered out of 100 to be rare?

And if not, how low would the population have to be, to be considered rare?

Thanks for weighing in.

[kallipolis]

Short Answer: Maybe.

Longer Answer: It depends on a number of factors that will make the card desirable or not, such as who the player is, what set is it from and how many other forms of parallels are there in that set, what is the production run, is it a rookie, is it autographed, etc. In my opinion, if it's from a set like Artifacts that floods it's production run with so many different kinds of parallels that would make it less desirable for me. For example, with this years Artifacts you have Copper (#/299), Emerald (#/99), Autumn (#/75), Aqua (#/45), Purple (#/20) and Black (#/5) (i.e. 5 out of the 6 parallels are under a 100 print run) and that waters down the rarity of the higher numbered parallel set. Although if it's a card of someone who is highly collectible then having one of them would make it more "rare" in the sense that it is a valued and sought after card.

Another example being if a set has a print run of 5,000 cards per player and each individual player has one parallel numbered to #/100, then that card would be more rare then a card numbered to #/100 from another set but that comes with a print run of 1,000 cards per player because your odds of pulling a #/100 card in the set with a 5,000 print run per player is going to be more difficult.

Then again, it all depends on those factors mentioned above too. A card can be rare, but whether it is desirable is another thing. I could have a 1/1 card of Joe Blow, but if nobody out there collects Joe Blow well then as rare as a card as it may be it may not have the value of a card numbered to #/500 of Connor McDavid from a valued set.