Are 1977 Star Wars Stickers Rarer Than the Cards? The Pack Arithmetic, and What Happened After

Every pack of 1977 Topps Star Wars held seven cards and one sticker, and collectors have long concluded that the stickers must be the scarce part of the set. The arithmetic of the pack says otherwise. At the moment a child tore the wrapper, any given sticker was nearly as likely to be inside as any given card. What made the stickers hard to find came later.

The pack arithmetic

Each of the five series had 66 cards and 11 stickers, and each wax pack held seven cards and one sticker.

Seven cards drawn from 66 means any particular card turns up about once in every nine and a half packs. One sticker drawn from 11 means any particular sticker turns up once in every eleven.

So, if the packs were evenly mixed, each sticker was about 86 per cent as common as each card. There was only one sticker in the pack, but there were only eleven to choose from. The two facts very nearly cancel out.

That rests on an assumption, and it is worth saying plainly. We do not have Topps' production records, and collation in the 1970s was never perfectly even. We have looked at the printed sheet itself in the arithmetic of the printed sheet. But nothing in the design of the pack made a sticker dramatically scarcer than a card.

What the grading record shows

The population reports tell a very different story.

Take the first card and the first sticker, both of Luke Skywalker. PSA has graded the Luke card roughly five times as often as the Luke sticker. And at the very top, the sticker is scarcer still: its rate of Gem Mint 10 grades, as a share of all copies graded, is about half the card's.

PSA's own account of the set says the same thing in words: the stickers are generally tougher to find in top condition than the cards. Two experienced collectors it spoke to singled out the Series 1 and Series 3 stickers as the hardest to find in pristine condition, while both had seen plenty of high-grade Series 2 and Series 5 stickers in recent years.

So the scarcity is real. It just did not come from the pack.

Where the stickers went

They were stickers. A card was made to be kept, sorted and swapped. A sticker was made to be peeled and stuck on a bedroom door, a school folder or a lunch box, and many were. Every one that was used is gone from the population for good.

They sat next to the gum. In the 1977 pack, the gum sat against the front of the pack, usually on the back of the sticker. We set out in what the pack did to the cards inside it how that left the stickers carrying most of the gum damage, while the cards' problem was the wax wrapper.

Fewer people send them for grading. A population report counts submissions, not survivors. Collectors have always chased the cards, the Luke Skywalker card above all, and it is likely that some of the gap in the reports is simply that more people send the cards in.

Put those three together and it is no surprise that stickers are harder to find in good condition today, even though they went into the packs at almost the same rate as the cards.

Why the series differ

The stickers changed partway through the run. The first two series have black borders, the last three a film-strip frame inside a white border. Collectors have observed that the Series 1 and Series 3 stickers are the hardest in top grade, and the Series 2 and Series 5 stickers the easiest.

Border colour does not explain it. Series 1 and Series 2 share the same black border, yet one is among the hardest and the other among the easiest. Nobody has documented why, and we will not invent a reason. It is one of the open questions in the set.

What it means for a collector

Do not pay a sticker premium for scarcity at issue. The packs did not make them rare. If a seller argues that stickers are rare because there was only one per pack, the arithmetic is against them.

Pay for condition. Where a sticker earns a premium, it is for surviving clean: unused, unstained, with sharp corners. That is genuinely hard to find.

Check the back. Sticker backs are blank and sat against the gum, so the back is where damage hides. A listing without a photograph of it is leaving out the most important side.

And treat population reports with care. A low population for a sticker can mean few survive in good condition, or simply that few people bother to grade them. Usually it is some of both.

There is more on the set in the five Star Wars series and how many perfect 1977 Star Wars cards exist.

The thing worth sitting with

Topps did not make the stickers scarce. Children did, by using them for exactly what they were made for.

The cards were kept because they were collectible. The stickers were stuck on things because they were stickers. Nearly fifty years later, that difference in what a child did with each one matters more to their value than anything about how they were packed.

This index tracks the 1977 Topps Star Wars cards and stickers grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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