How a Connor Bedard card could help one Blackhawks fan pay off his mortgage
Fun fact: there are bounties for hockey cards.
In July of 2022, Michael Davis bought his first house in the Chicago area, and his daughter was born.
In July of 2024, he might be able to pay off his mortgage and put a sizable chunk away for her college fund.
Thank Connor Bedard. Better yet, thank a one-of-a-kind Connor Bedard hockey card.
“I’m going to be contacting my mortgage company. I want to find the payoff number for my house, and that plus maybe a little bit more is what I’m gonna seriously want to ask for,” Davis said. “Considering I just bought my house two years ago … I think that’s when this will really hit me, when that type of money is in my bank account to do those types of things.”
This is the card Davis won in a card break through SkolNSteel breaks on WhatNot on Saturday, officially known as the “2023-24 Upper Deck Extended Series 1/1 Gold Outburst Connor Bedard Draft Day Rookie.”
If you look at the bottom right of the card, right above Bedard’s name, you’ll see the “1/1” distinction.
Zack Meyers, who pulled the card out of a break on Saturday, is planning on getting the card officially authenticated this week at the National Card Show in Cleveland.
Davis is flying from Chicago to Cleveland on Thursday to meet Meyers and his business partner, Travis Marshall, at the show. He’s planning on taking the card home with him and then plans to sort through potential options for the sale.
That sale is going to be fascinating, especially when we are talking about something that could potentially pay off a mortgage for Davis.
The true value will be what someone is actually willing to pay for it.
Much like the sport itself, hockey cards have a huge gap between Wayne Gretzky and everyone else.
The most expensive hockey card of all time is a Gretzky rookie card, PSA graded to 10, that sold for $3.75 million. The second most expensive card is also a Gretzky rookie, one that sold for $1.2 million.
After that, the next most expensive card not featuring Gretzky sold for $276,000 in 2021 — a Bobby Orr 1966 pristine rookie card. That’s a nice haul for a card, but it’s nearly a million away from being on the same planet as Gretzky.
Even dreaming of paying off a mortgage with a single hockey card would typically be a fool’s errand.
But Bedard cards are different. In fact, they broke the mold for the market.
Unlike prior generational players like Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid, Bedard was drafted after the collectible space boomed during COVID. For the 18 months or so that people were effectively sequestered, sports spending habits shifted from tickets and in-person experiences to the collecting space. The hobby saw a boom in interest in all sports, and it’s continued to grow from that wave in 2020 and 2021.
And while Chicago fans could celebrate drafting Bedard when they won the draft lottery, Upper Deck — which owns the NHL exclusive trading card license — couldn’t release a Bedard rookie card until he officially played an NHL regular season game.
Upper Deck also leaned hard into it and revamped their “Young Guns” — the NHL flagship rookie card series — to coincide with Bedard’s arrival.
There are more parallels (versions of the same card with different colored borders or design, and numbered print scarcity), and Upper Deck announced there would be a 1-of-1 “OutBurst Gold” Bedard Young Guns card, the first time the company has done something like that.
That card, the one-of-a-kind “OutBurst Gold,” has yet to be found, but it’s already valued at $1 million after a Dave & Adam’s, a card shop in the Buffalo area, put out a public $1 million bounty for the card.
That would make Bedard the second $1 million player, card-wise, in NHL history.
It also means that each box of the 2023/24 Upper Deck Series 2 Hockey Hobby could be holding hockey’s version of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket.
And like the novel by Roald Dahl, that possibility has skyrocketed the market.
And it’s not just the Series 2; any hockey cards from 2023-24, which could feature a Bedard rookie, have seen a spike in costs.
“We’ve been doing this (breaking cards) since 2022,” Meyers said. “The Bedard craze has driven boxes of cards up 200 and 300 percent. The crazy thing is hockey still isn’t as expensive box-wise as the other sports, so Bedard broke hockey and brought it up closer to other sports when it came to price point.”
It’s also driven up the price of buying the Chicago Blackhawks in a card break. Go check any hockey card break, and Chicago will likely be the most expensive team to buy.
That actually wasn’t the case when Davis hit his card. It was random team break, it cost $14 per team to spin a wheel and get assigned a team. Davis actually bought most of the teams in pursuit of a Chicago spin, gifting some other teams to others in the chat, for example sending a known New York Rangers fan those cards.
Call it a bit of cosmic cardma, but after gifting out other teams this happened.
For Meyers, this was the biggest pull SkolNSteel have had in the two years they’ve been breaking cards. Meyers and Marshall, who live in Florida, started breaking cards as a hobby and eventually grew a business large enough that both went full-time into card breaking. They have since hired a third full-time employee, all from consistently opening boxes of cards seven days a week for a live-streaming audience.
“I’m so happy it went to a guy who is a die-hard Blackhawks fan,” Meyers said. “Like, we’ve gotten to know him through the stream, so this card would have been amazing to pull no matter what, but it’s special that it went to someone who is a Blackhawks fan like him.”
Davis has been aggressively “Bedard hunting” for months, buying into breaks in search of creating a Bedard collection that would turn into an investment.
“I truly believe in Chicago we have two GOATs now, one in Michael Jordan and another in Bedard, who I believe people will see is right up there with Gretzky at the end of his career,” Davis said. “For me, I want to build this Bedard collection, enjoy it for a while, let it grow with value as his career goes and he proves to everyone just how good he is. And then work on selling it when the time is right.”
That, of course, applies to the rest of the collection. When it comes to the “2023-24 Upper Deck Extended Series 1/1 Gold Outburst Connor Bedard Draft Day Rookie” card that he recently snagged, Davis is looking to find a buyer now.
“I’ve already gotten some lowball offers off the bat, people trying to capitalize on a quick decision by me,” Davis said. “But I’m going to make sure I get the right value for it. Right now there is no comp for this card; you comp a 1-of-1 against other 1-of-1s, and hey, there is a public valuation of $1 million for the biggest one.”
Davis said he feels like he’s helping set the market for the Bedard 1-of-1 rookie cards, and it would be a disservice to future collectors who pull other 1-of-1 Bedard cards to not push for fair and maximum value.
And if he can get the fair value in his mind, it’ll potentially be a top-5 sale of a hockey card all-time.
This post was brought to you by The Late Game, the beer league hockey movie I’m in where I play a goalie named Nick.
It’s hilarious, in my biased opinion, and you can watch it now on Prime Video in the United States.
Here is the trailer.
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Anyone have a quick run down of what the card break process is and what it means to buy a spin? I was kind of lost about that part of this. But I can appreciate what getting this card means for this guy!