In what Heritage Auctions described as “the greatest unopened find of the 21st century,” a case of 1976 Topps "Star Trek" cards, including 24 boxes of unopened packs, sold for a record $58,750 Thursday.
This the highest price ever paid for a "Star Trek" card lot, as well as a record price for any television-based card set sale.
Big money chasing unopened product is nothing new.
The top prices for such untouched treasures often come from famed releases such as 1986 Fleer Basketball, 1979 O-Pee-Chee Hockey and the 1999 Pokémon 1st Edition set, which have sold for as high as $362,400, $198,000 and $432,000, respectively, over the years.
For some, the appeal comes in scooping up a chance at pulling a key card from an iconic release. The quintessential example comes in 1986 Fleer, which holds a Michael Jordan rookie.
For others, it’s about owning something that simply shouldn’t exist: A box (or boxes) explicitly produced and marketed for its contents, designed to be opened — making any examples remaining untouched an extraordinary rarity.
But for the most part, all of these sales occur for single boxes. There are exceptions, such as the 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Hockey case, which was reported to sell for $3.72 million at Heritage in February 2024. That sale was soon complicated by buyer’s remorse and the current status of the case is unclear.
Otherwise, cases containing multiple boxes appearing at auction are almost exclusively releases from the 21st century, such as a sealed case of 2003 Exquisite Collection Basketball, which sold for $336,000 in January 2023 at Fanatics Collect.
When Topps released the 1976 "Star Trek" set seven years after the cancellation of the original TV show, it marked the first American "Star Trek" card set released in nearly a decade with an 88-card checklist — it was also the first U.S. set produced in color.
Each pack was sold for 10 cents and meant to serve the “next generation” of Star Trek fans. In addition to cards, 22 stickers appear in the checklist
Though not the first "Star Trek" card set, it’s arguably the most popular and is considered a key release in the history of entertainment cards.
As Mark Adams, who at one point owned one of the finest graded sets from the series, told PSA in 2013, it compares favorably to the 1967 Leaf set, applauding how it represents the show: “The backs on these actually coincide with the show's storylines, and they give a really good synopsis of the photo on the front, which is useful because a lot of people don't know the episodes and they can learn as they go," Adams said.
Along with the desirability of the set as a cultural touchstone, the product’s printing issues — affecting centering and gum stains — have made the chase for high-grade cards and stickers (found one per pack) a challenge for set collectors. To date, PSA reports a total of 236 PSA 10 examples from the set out of 14,864 graded copies.
No cards have a PSA 10 population of 10 or more.
One of the multiple cards lacking a single PSA 10 example is the Dr. "Bones" McCoy card, despite ranking first among total copies graded by PSA from the set (255). Even among a set known for notoriously difficult condition, it’s in a class of its own. This is due to its position in the original card sheet used for printing, where it was located on the top row, a “vulnerable position” according to PSA.
A PSA 9 example (population of six) sold for $2,901 in October 2021. That rarity has transformed the McCoy card into the set’s most coveted. The record sale of any card (not sticker) from the set is The U.S.S. Enterprise #1, one of two PSA 10s, which sold for just under $4,500 on eBay in 2021.
The biggest sales relating to the 1976 Topps Star Trek release have always come from complete sets and sealed boxes. Prior to Thursday’s sale, the most expensive single lot of the cards was for a complete set of the 22 stickers (ranked first on the PSA registry), which consisted of 19 of the 22 stickers in the highest grade. Memory Lane sold the stickers for $20,187.60 in September 2022.
Earlier this year, the fourth-ranked complete set of cards in PSA’s registry notched $19,541 at Memory Lane. Most of the other top sales belong to unopened boxes of the set. The record price for an unopened wax box is $10,800, paid in October 2016. More recently, a BBCE-certified box sold for $5,125 at Heritage in April.
But never has a full case like the one sold Thursday at Heritage come to market. Consisting of a grand total of 4,320 cards and 864 stickers, its record price might even turn out to be a steal considering it averages out to less than $2,500 per box — far below current prices.
Besides Pokémon, other top sales of sealed boxes of non-sports cards come from Magic: The Gathering Arabian Nights booster boxes (with two top sales of $212,500 each) and what is likely the most comparable product to "Star Trek," the 1977 Topps "Star Wars" unopened boxes (series 1-5), which have a top sale of $32,844.
The record for any non-sports unopened wax box is $63,084 for a 1967 Topps Wacky Packages box which sold in December 2022 at Mile High.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.