The most valuable hockey cards of all time are dominated, almost embarrassingly so, by a single photograph: a teenage Wayne Gretzky in an Edmonton Oilers jersey, printed in 1979 by two rival gum manufacturers from the same rookie-season image. Between them, those two cards hold the highest prices any hockey card has fetched, a gap that has only widened since Gretzky retired in 1999. Everything else here still runs into six figures, down to a rookie barely two seasons into his NHL career.
A worn, base-grade 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky can still be bought for under a hundred pounds, and tens of thousands survive in shoeboxes across Canada. What separates that card from the one topping this list is a single grading slab: of the thousands PSA has examined, only two have ever earned a Gem Mint 10, and it is those two cards, not the print run, that collectors are bidding on.
Hockey cards have ridden the same boom-and-correction cycles as the wider sports card market since 2020, but demand for the pre-internet stars has proved durable, and Robert Edward Auctions and Heritage Auctions between them have set most of the records below. Here are ten of the most valuable.
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The 10 most valuable hockey cards of all time
1. 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky rookie card, PSA Gem Mint 10 (£2.6 million)
Heritage Auctions brokered this card privately in May 2021, one of only two O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookies ever graded Gem Mint 10. It broke the previous record of $1.29 million, paid for the only other Gem Mint 10 copy five months earlier.
Credit: Heritage Auctions
2. 1979 Topps Wayne Gretzky rookie card, PSA Gem Mint 10 (£544,248)
Topps and O-Pee-Chee printed Gretzky’s rookie card from the same photograph, but the American Topps version is scarcer in top grade, with only two ever reaching Gem Mint 10. Heritage sold this one at the same December 2020 auction that first pushed the Canadian version past a million dollars.
Credit: Heritage Auctions
3. 2015-16 Upper Deck Ultimate Collection Connor McDavid Rookie (Spectrum Teal Autograph Shield), #’d 1/1 (£228,584)
This one-of-one card carries a swatch from the NHL shield on a jersey McDavid wore as a rookie, alongside his signature. It drew 41 bids at Heritage in May 2025 before reaching $305,000, a record for any McDavid card.
Credit: Heritage Auctions
4. 1966-67 Topps USA Test Hockey Bobby Orr rookie card, PSA Mint 9 (£180,325)
Topps trialled an English-only test print of its 1966-67 set before settling on the bilingual version sold across Canada, and PSA has graded barely 100 examples against nearly 1,500 of the standard card. Robert Edward Auctions sold this copy, one of only three at this grade, in April 2025.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
5. 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky rookie card, PSA Mint 9 (£117,727)
A grade below the two Gem Mint 10s, this O-Pee-Chee is still rare: of 8,000 PSA submissions, only two have graded higher. Robert Edward Auctions sold it against a $50,000 reserve in December 2021.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
6. 1958-59 Topps Bobby Hull rookie card, SGC NM/MT 8 (£65,656)
Hull’s card closes the 1958-59 Topps set at number 66, a position prone to wear and print defects. This copy, one of only four at this SGC grade, sold in the same sale as the Gretzky PSA 9 above.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
7. 1966-67 Topps Bobby Orr rookie card, SGC Mint 96 (£41,171)
This is the standard bilingual issue rather than the rarer US test print, but it is still exceptional: only one of 138 SGC-graded copies scores higher. Robert Edward Auctions sold it in October 2017.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
8. 1911-12 C55 Imperial Tobacco Georges Vezina rookie card, SGC 5 (£13,260)
Vezina’s only recognised rookie card predates the NHL, issued while he tended goal for the Canadiens in the National Hockey Association. Collector Leonard Witman consigned this SGC 5 example to Robert Edward Auctions in Fall 2022.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
9. 1951-52 Parkhurst Terry Sawchuk rookie card, PSA NM-MT 8 (£6,421)
Parkhurst’s 1951-52 set was hockey’s first issue since O-Pee-Chee stopped making cards in 1940, and its thin stock makes a high grade hard to find. This Sawchuk rookie sold through Robert Edward Auctions in August 2025.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
10. 1957-58 Parkhurst Henri Richard rookie card, PSA NM-MT 8 (£6,200)
Henri Richard’s rookie card arrived six years after his brother Maurice’s, in a Parkhurst set built around the Canadiens dynasty. Robert Edward Auctions sold this example in the same August 2025 auction as the Sawchuk above.
Credit: Robert Edward Auctions
How manufactured rarity is chasing an accident from 1979
The scale of the gap is the real story here. Gretzky’s O-Pee-Chee rookie in its finest grade is worth close to five times the next card on this list, and over four hundred times the least expensive one. No card printed since his retirement has closed that gap the same way, by simply surviving in extraordinary condition. Every modern entry instead owes its price to something built into the card at the factory: a serial number of one, a jersey swatch, an on-card signature.
That gap looks unlikely to close. Manufacturers now engineer scarcity into a card before it reaches a pack, while Gretzky’s rarity was never designed, only made one kept and one discarded card at a time by children who never expected 1979 cardboard to matter.
