So there I was stopping at one Goodwill on the way home from work on Oct. 12, 2016, when I saw in the showcase a sealed 1990-91 Pro Set Series One NHL box of cards. Typically these boxes get left at thrift stores and they have already been pilfered of anything of value, OR they are priced in such a fashion they are not worth the gamble.
And what gamble is there, you might ask? A long shot at hitting a winning lottery ticket in the form of a Stanley Cup hologram limited to 5,000 copies.
We have to set the scene with Pro Set before we go any further. Long before there were autographs and relics cards that we see today, chase cards from the early 1990s usually meant the cards were glossy as compared to your typical matte finish, or they had some sort of flashy foil to make it obvious that you had something special. With Pro Set they made holograms, and they were an absolutely needle in a haystack to find.
Perhaps the most famous Pro Set hologram is the Lombardi Trophy hologram that was inserted into the NFL product of 1990. But more valuable is the Stanley Cup version inserted randomly into Series One packs of 1990-91 Pro Set hockey.
If you think they’re easy to pull because there are 5,000 of them guess again. There literally are close to — if not more than — a million produced of each base card in most brands these years, rendering them worthless. The shiny holograms that were impossible to pull have held their value. The Lombardi hologram usually fetches between $40-$100 in raw condition and much more if graded. And a quick check of eBay while I was in the store Wednesday night showed that the Stanley Cup holograms were selling upward of $125 in raw condition.
I looked at the box through the locked case and was able to see the $6.14 price tag. I figured the box was worth the price of two cups of Starbucks coffee. After all, 10/12/16 was the Opening Night of the NHL season and it gave me something to open while I was watching the San Jose Sharks defeat the Los Angeles Kings.
So I paid for it, drove home, ate dinner, turned on the game and opened pack by pack slowly looking not only for the hologram, but also any errors/variations which also have a following.
I got 35 packs deep into the box with nothing really special when this happened:
The third or fourth card in that stack isn’t like the others because … it’s a HOLOGRAM!
You newer collectors might night be laughing at this pull because by today’s standards because unless anything is numbered to like 50 copies you don’t consider it rare. But for us who grew up in the junk wax era, finding something like this is insane. And to make this case even more impossible it comes from an abandoned g box located at a thrift store.
Anyhow, when I saw the shiny hologram the first thing I did was pulled out my phone and take the aforementioned picture and then record this video.
The card isn’t mint, which is crazy since this was a sealed box, but it’s probably going to stay in my collection as this is an epic pull given the circumstances.
Total cost of this Thrift Treasure: $6.14.
You can see more Thrift Treasures posts Here.
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