2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 9: No Autos Here

Two posts left to wrap up the Expo. Time to highlight some of the non-hits left in my "to post" file.

One last card from that table I've been showing cards from the past few days. Not quite a vintage card on par with my previous show-offs, but how can I pass on a cheap (yet still in good shape) rookie card of a Hall of Famer?

And here's another Dino from a design that predates the rookie card but was issued in the 2000's. Either way, I got card with both the home and road North Stars uniforms.

I picked this up for the Pac-Man mask, so I probably should have shown it off on Monday. Oops. It just got mixed in with the Rangers alumni base card content.

Which means it was mixed in alongside these two cards. One Shane Prince for my Senators collection (meaning that Matt O'Connor, who got his first card as a S1 Young Gun), is now the only Senators player with a card that I don't at least have one card of. Both of these cards have way too much border, but I think I prefer the MVP card since it is more likely to have been photographed during game action.

I was a big fan of the Territories subset in MVP after getting one in my only pack of the product. Anything that makes me think of the 1993 Leaf releases is a good thing, There were two that I really wanted, and I picked up both of them. Turris for my Sens collection, and Sundin because those old Nordiques uniforms are still great on cardboard. I think this is the only defunct team in the checklist.

And the city  photo is much clearer on the card back.

Just the autos to go tomorrow!

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 8: 2-14 Hockey Goodies

You just knew I wouldn't be able to resist additions to this collection.

Let's start with the most expensive card I got.

This Milan Hejduk card came in at $3. It seems rather ordinary. It isn't a rookie, nor is there an autograph or relic attached. It isn't particularly shiny. Not numbered either.

Well, it had something attached to the card:

Not a bobble head, but a Playmaker. This is my first non-card item in the collection. While I didn't plan to go in this direction, at least I can defend it by saying "it came with a card". Although the head bobbles, it is shorter, and noticeably lighter than my actual bobble heads. I'll only count the card as part of the actual collection.

But at least this now means I can pick up a copy of Black Ice by Val James without any worrying about having only one non-card thing in the collection.

Here's some more Milan stuff. With these, he joins Marian Gaborik as the second player to reach the 100 card plateau.

Since I got 4 new Hejduk cards, I had to have Marian maintain his lead with these 4 new cards.

Neither was the big winner though in terms of cards added. Brandon Sutter moves into 3rd place overall with 43 cards after picking up 6 new cards.

 Including his Young Guns card.

A parallel of one of my favourite photos in the collection.

Some O-Pee-Chee regular.

And some retro. Perfect match Victor Kozlov is now in 4th place, with 38 cards and no additions at the Expo.

One 79-80 retro deserves another. So here's Boris Valabik card #7.

The usual guy who had tables of 80s OPC wasn't there. I did have a list of Svobodas and Poddubnies, but only ended up with this one.

And finally, here is another card from that misc. vintage table I mentioned yesterday. This is my 4th card of Charlie Burns, and my oldest card of his.

2 more Expo posts to go!

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 7: Everything but Hockey

The Expo is a hockey event mostly, although looking carefully can result in other sports making an appearance. Most of my non-hockey stuff was of a set building variety. I won't bore you with those, but I knocked 3 of my sets down to 16 cards total to finish them. Hoops and Topps Football can be seen on my set building wantlist, the 16th is on my top 10 list.

But I won't bore you with posting a bunch of those cards. Instead, it is time to show off everything but the set building cards, except for the hockey stuff. I've still got 3 more days of posts dedicated to the those.

Only one vintage baseball card added to my collection at the show, so I better make it a good one. I think I did, with this Hoyt Wilhelm from 1964. This was one of several vintage cards I pulled from a 3 for $5 bin that saw some really nice vintage cards enter my collection, along with some on their way into envelopes for other bloggers.

And you can't say I didn't pick myself up an autograph of Connor. At least I can say with certainty that this guy's penmanship is better than McDavid's.

Another penmanship card I picked up. After getting these two, maybe my thoughts on the penmanship of the 2014 rookie class was premature. Neither one is a Quincy Enunwa, but I've got no complaints about either of these.

Dezmin Lewis, OTOH, gets into my Bills binder despite the bare bones of the signature. At least he dotted the line on a rough estimate of where the I's were.

There are a lot of Dee Brown autographs out there, so having him appear in a subset called Elusive Ink seems like a stretch. Still, this is a nice addition to my Celtics collection, and the design of the card makes it really hard to notice that it is a sticker-graph.

And there's all I need to post to set up 3 straight days of hockey posts.

A New Face

Since he just debuted for the Dallas Stars, he hasn't got his official NHL card yet. Despite that fact, his ITG card where he's still on the Kitchener Rangers makes him an addition to their alumni collection.

And as a bonus for Remembrance Day, he's wearing one of their Remembrance Day uniform variations. These actually made an appearance on a lot of ITG cards in that season's releases. I guess their photographers was only in town that one day.

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 5: Victory is Mine!

Keeping my promise to pick up a box of the cheap repack-frequented product should they be available, I shelled out $15 for this at the show. $15 for 36 packs sounds like fun! I've already shown the base plenty of times, so I'll focus on the rest of the set. Combining with the repacks from before, I ended up 1 short of the 200 card base set (curses upon you, Jussi Jokinen!).

Gold parallels fall at a rate of 1 per box. Here's the one from my box. Ryder is probably on the middling range of possible results, but I really didn't buy this for the chance at a big money card.

Rookies fell at a rate of every other pack. I actually did pretty well in getting some of the bigger name rookies out of this box, especially Giroux and Mason. Looking at the checklist, there's only a handful of names I need to finish this portion of the set, with only a couple of familiar names on the list. Brian Boyle? Jonathan Ericsson? I guess Teddy Purcell might be the biggest name, but he still isn't that much of a chase. I'm 15 out from those, and the list of those will be on my set-building wantlist shortly, if not already.

The rest of the packs contained a mix of inserts from the Game Breakers and Stars of the Game series. That seems repetitive to have two insert sets with very little to differentiate between them, but for $15, I can't complain.

One thing interesting about the collation:

From two 50 card insert sets, each one had a Bergeron and Stastny.

And there you have the highlights from a 15 dollar box.

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 4: Impromptu Masked Mondays

Today, some of the cards on their way to the masks binder.

Only one card will be going into the pre-2005 binder. That will be this one. I had no idea that there were Action Packed-type hockey cards in the 90s, although I probably should not be surprised in retrospect. I am surprised the subset would be given such a cheesy name as "Goal Patrol".

Sure, you can't really see the mask that well, but how could I pass on a chance to pick up a parallel rookie card of Sergei Bobrovsky for a mere quarter?

These were also from the same quarter bin. You have another one of my favourites from the past 10 years with J-S Giguere's double-duck mask. Kari's Kill Bill mask makes yet another appearance in my collection. While I do have several of Jason LaBarbera's wrestling masks in my collection, this is my first one of his Hulk Hogan lid.

It has been a pretty Flyers intensive post, so let's wrap it up with one on its way to the hits binder. There might have been issues with the pen at the start, but things corrected itself, and for a few bucks I landed an on-card autograph, numbered to 99 copies, of probably my favourite lunatic in hockey history. He was always someone I wanted an auto from, but hadn't pulled the trigger on it yet, hoping for a cheap one to cross my path. I couldn't wait any longer.

I'm amazed this isn't signed in blood.

And there's another Expo post in the books.

Outgoing Mail Alert!

If these zip codes seem familiar, keep your eyes firmly transfixed on your mailbox, since a mailing has either already gone out, or will go out later today.

02919
19713
26505
27314
32803
33511
40567
43019
48105
60586
90230

ObCard: There was very little overlap between cards I got at the Expo for others and my PCs, but there was this one:

While this could be an addition to Too Many Manninghams' basketball hit collection, this will instead be going into my Canadians in the NBA collection. Nik's Santa hat relic will be joining my Anthony Bennett towel relic in terms of "This is really a relic card?" cards.

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 3: 3 Downs. 1 Box.

My favourite Upper Deck product of the year dropped just before the show. If just means a couple weeks and there not being anywhere near the hype of the S1 hockey. Maybe because there are no cards of anybody named Connor in this one.

Here's a couple of the base cards. I did complete the 100 card base set of offense players with about 20 or so dupes of this portion left over. Bills fans should recognize the last name on Luke Tasker. He's Steve's son.

Here's the card backs. How can you hate any card that includes a team called the "Milan Rhinos"?

101-150 are the defensive/special team cards. These are SP'd, along with the rest of the 101-200 portion at 1 per pack. Bear Woods has both an awesome name and the best white guy dreads ever. He has autos in this set where he's just written BEAR 48 on the sticker.

All-Stars make up the 151-175 portion of the set. These players also appear in the base set with regular cards. SJ Green was the only card I pulled in this set that wasn't an Alberta-based team card.

The rookies wrap up the last 25 cards. At least this year, they are actually rookies. Last year, it also included guys just making their CFL debuts. So, that meant there were rookie cards of Steve Slaton, Chad Ocho Cinco and Troy Smith. Here you have a couple great names in Sukh Chungh and Shaquille Murray-Lawrence as well as Air Canada, Brandon Bridge. He's also a bit of rarity. Although he played in the NCAA, there have not been many Canadian QBs in the CFL.

8 OPC cards were in the box, as expected. I hadn't seen this portion of the checklist, so pulling a Jeff Garcia was a pleasant surprise. 

The two promised relics. I didn't see any white relics last season, but they do make an appearance this year. Marauder remains the best French from English translation of a football position.

And I got a tough pull from this box! Autos fall at a rate of 1 per 96 packs, or every 4 boxes. I was really happy to see this pop out. 


A really fun box of stuff from my favourite league!

But wait, there is still more!

Here's an auto of the aforementioned Brandon Bridge.

And Terrence Toliver, who made an appearance in the base set of the CFL, and is seen here in an on-card auto from 2011 Platinum. He's with my beloved Hamilton Tiger-Cats now, so grabbing a cheap autograph of him was an easy decision.

And there you have it!

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 2: And my first non-UD S1 Box Break.

I bought three boxes of cards at the Expo. One box of 2015 UD CFL. One box of 2008-09 Victory (as promised in one of my repack posts), and a box of 12-13 Limited. Because the latter was cheap, and sometimes it is fun to bust a hit-based product.

I was promised 7 cards. I got 8. Which one is the 8th is up to you.

I can say for sure one of these was not the extra card, as these were the two base cards I was promised. The Crawford is a nice card for my mask binder, but I'm somewhat surprised by the Dorsett. While it is interesting to see a tough guy type get a card in this, he doesn't seem to be the type featured in a product with a smaller base make-up. Still kinda cool though. At least he's still playing in the NHL, racking up PIM in Vancouver.

These two auto patches are technically part of the base. Since the box promised 3 hits, with at least one being an auto, I guess I ended up on the upper end of that. Jaden isn't the major hit that he once was, but it is still a nice looking card. He had an OK start to the season, but is now out until February or so after ankle surgery. The Clark is a silver parallel. He's now in the Avalanche system.

And here's the other promised. A plain one-colour swatch, but the derpy look on Doan is more memorable than the relic.

A Shane Doan hot box! This card is acetate, although only the glass portion of the card is clear. But, that's pretty appropriate. Shane also goes 2-for-2 in terms of unflattering photos.

This is one of those cards where the foilness of them makes them challenging to read. Thankfully, the mask makes it obvious that it is Gerry Cheevers without having to play around with getting the right angle.

And my lowest numbered card of the break is the /10 gold parallel of Corey Perry. The jagged portion at the side is supposed to join with another player. If the numbers are supposed to match, it was Patrick Kane. 

My faves of the bunch are not the hits, but the Cheevers and the acetate Doan. So, while not a big money box, a couple really nice keepers make it still pleasant. 

And I can celebrate going to the Expo and not picking up a box of S1.

2015 Fall Expo Goodies Part 1: Batteries Not Included

I'm way too tired to do a full recap, so you'll have to wait for the week to go on (as well as check out others blogs) to see some my score. The happiest people will be collectors of Wolverines, Blackhawks, Ducks, Whalers and the Lightning who should be getting nice sized bubble envelopes. Smaller envelopes should be on the way to collectors of the Pittsburgh Pirates/Penguins and someone who was interested in Cincinnati Stingers cards.

As for the requisite one card, batteries might not be a necessity, but they couldn't make this card any brighter than it already is.