The Math of Wax

Some of the coolest items that you can see at card shows are sealed packs of vintage cards.  At the time many of those packs were distributed to the public, they only cost around 5¢.  If you travel over to a dealer that sells vintage packs from the 60’s you will see that they don’t cost 5¢, but more like $500.00.  Lets take this pack of 1966 Topps football cards for example. 

Back in 1966 this pack only cost 5¢.  Now lets travel forward 42 years to today.  Recently this pack sold for $500.00 on eBay.  That is an outstanding  9,999% increase in price.  After seeing this, it got me thinking about today’s products and what their potential value might be in decades to come.  For example, today a pack/box of 2007 Upper Deck Exquisite football cards sell for around $400.00. 

If you apply the same principle to the Exquisite box/pack, in theory it should be worth about $4 million within 42 years.  Now, we all know that $4 million in 42 years isn’t as much as $4 million today, but that is still a huge increase in price.   

Do I think the same thing will happen to the Exquisite box/pack as the pack of 1966 Topps, probably not.  In today’s hobby, there are a lot more packs of Exquisite than packs of 1966 Topps.  Back in the 60’s, people rarely ever bought packs to keep the sealed.  Plus you have to take into account what you can get in each pack.  With the 1966 Topps pack you could pull some vintage cards in great condition of Hall of Fame players.  Who knows what will happen to the players in the Exquisite box/pack.  They could be cut from all their teams and never play in the NFL again.  I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I applied the same increase in percentage to the Exquisite pack/box as the 1966 Topps pack.