Nickel Box Chronicles - Part 1 - Masked Monday

Better than a dime box - a nickel box! I found one at a show this past weekend. While some of the cards are already marked to head elsewhere, I did add a few new ones into my varied collections, and I'll be showing them off this week, interspersed with 2 and a half trade envelopes I still need to get to.

The mask binders were the big winners in terms of volume, landing over 100 cards between them. And darned if I'm not going to show them all off here. I know the Lalime technically isn't one, but it is interesting enough to count for the misc binder. And that isn't even the best photo when it includes that Belfour. Fave mask is Antero's Frank Nitti mask.

Nikolai Khabibulin pictured by an advertisement that makes it seem like he'll be hit by a train? Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. And it is appropriate that this group of cards ends with Marc-Andre Fleury...

since he was the big winner in terms of volume with 9 cards bound for the binder.

Now, onto the 9 card scans. A nice mix here with a legend in Hextall, a current star with a trio of Pekka Rinnes, a guy I'd completely forgotten about with LeBrecque, and a stint I'd completely forgotten about with Wregget pictured with Calgary.

Upper Deck really with a lot of close-ups of masks in the mid-late 90s on their base cards. No complaints here. I really like the Belfour the best in this group, as I have no memory of him in a black version of his classic design while in Chicago. 

Petr Mrazek will also be making an appearance when I get to the 2/14 portion of this box. I'm unsure why Wade wanted to sport the Gorton's fisherman logo on his mask, since I don't think he ever had to wear it as a jersey. 

Retro designs! Both real and imagined! There's a good reason why Chicago's logo is seen as a profile and not from the front, and Thibault's mask shows the reasons why.

I've posted that Jaks mask before, since I like that he's still wearing the Phoenix Roadrunners design while in a Kings uniform. Fichaud also goes for a minor league look as well since he's still in the Chicoutimi Sagueneens design. My favourite is the Corey Hirsch 'Psycho' house design, and it turns out there may have been a little more behind that than just a movie reference.

Is the loudest card in this group the Tallas jersey, the Smith design or the Pacific of Mike Vernon? Any answer of the three would be acceptable. I already had the Ryan Miller retro look on a Portfolio issue, now I've got more of a close-up as well.

The box did have a nice selection of 1997 base cards.

The Glenn Healy won't count for the binder, but much like the Lalime at the top, the photo was too perfect to pass on. Even cards from the past season could be found in that nickel box, as shown by the quartet of 16-17 UDs. More of those loud 13-14 retros as well. 

The final nine-pack! Brathwaite is a dupe, but I can have one of the only guy that can logically not use Jason as the slasher-movie icon in both my mask and miscellaneous binders. 

And that's it. My scanner needs a rest after that. Something a little smaller tomorrow, maybe from this show, maybe not.