1971 & 1973 O-pee-chee

jayhawke

I am thinking about starting '71 & '73 OPC baseball sets. I know '71 black borders are killers to get in high grade. I am not sure about '73 OPC. I would like to hear thoughts on these tough issues. So are these cards much rarer than the regular issue and how much of a premium am I going to pay for them? I noticed the pop reports are less than 5% of each regular set.

packCollector

71's are next to impossible, you may never finsih that set in high grade. the issue is poor production and the black borders, the only way you are going ot get fresh cards is from packs which even with the recent mastro stuff are extremely difficult to find in any quanity and expensive, also each pack will only yield 1 or 2 gradable cards, I opened 1 last week and got 2 gradable cards , the other 6 were miscut..

73's are easier but still tough. there were tons of production faults with very rough edges and centering is a nightmare to say the least. there was a case of these (about 12 boxes were free from any storage issues) that came to the market a year and helped the supply along. before that the packs were extinct. they are still pretty tough but can be bought very reasonably on ebay as they were oversold. at least 1/2 the boxes were opened that I know of so it will only be a matter of time before the packs get tough again. these are easier than 71 but still somewhat of a challenge to locate for the most part in nm/mint condition or better.

in both cases , production was 5-10% of topps production and combined with poor storage in canada and poor production they are much tougher. In both cases , they are not going to cost you much more than the topps issues , outside of stars and some teams as there is a lot of demand from player collectors, because the demand is not there so you will not get into bidding wars. good luck

JoeBanzai

I would agree with packcollector. The prices aren't nearly as high as they should be in comparison to Topps' regarding stated production numbers. OPC's, however can be very expensive in high grade. Collecting them sounds like a fun and challenging effort.

Good luck!

JoeBanzai

jayhawke

packcollector,

I sent you a pm, but I don't see it in the sent history. Let me know.

packCollector

just turned my pm on thanks