Puck Drop

 The NHL season has a couple weeks to go before their season kicks off, but the Kitchener Rangers start their season tonight. While it does look like it is going to be a rebuilding year, I can look to the past for some of their alumni for that collection.

I was at the LCS a few weeks back, and they had a bunch of these Humpty Dumpty cards from the early 90s. These were inside bags of chips and the like at the time. I picked up a couple of Whalers cards to send to a blogger-turned-youtuber. And I picked up this Scott Stevens and this Gilbert Dionne for myself. 

For the rest of the way, it is nothing but cards from the online-only Ultra release. Of course, there's plenty of actual cards to go along with the e-cards.

Just like these silver parallels. And I didn't even add any John Gibson content from this set.

Blue parallels are also remarkably cheap at COMC - it was under 50 cents from one of these /399 cards.

To complete the Jeff Skinner trilogy, here he is in insert form with a medallion. There have been gold or platinum medallion parallels in many Ultra releases, but here, they're just inserts. 

WOO-HOO! Throwback design. And it is a pretty good representation of 1991 Fleer Ultra. The font is a little off, but it does look pretty nice with some shininess thrown in for good measure.

But with only one original image on the back - ouch. So much potential. 

I guess Ultra does mean there might be some oddness in this, and this kinda qualifies. I wouldn't mind seeing this design inspire the playing card design in a future O-Pee-Chee insert. This also has sort of a leathery feel to it, something that one definitely is not a common feature of cards.

Finally, back to the 80s, and a member of their first Memorial Cup winning team. This sandwiches perfectly with the Scott Stevens at the start of this post. Here, we're saluting 50 goal scorers. And there's even the bonus of it being a classic logo and a card of someone who had a very good career, but only makes sporadic appearances in modern sets. 

There you have it!