Late Season Hockey Breaks

 

It's hard to believe that hockey season is almost over and baseball opening day is coming up fast. Unfortunately for me, that means that hockey cards will soon be in short supply again both at card shows and on retail shelves. I've been stockpiling a few hockey things recently. I've also got this leftover tin of 2017-18 Series 1 and a blaster box of O-Pee-Chee that I've been sitting on since Christmas. I might as well go ahead and bust into both. I won't be going pack by pack but I'll show some highlights from both the tin and the OPC blaster.

As I busted the Series 1 tin, I took photos of each pack. This pack held probably my best pull ever from retail hockey ... the Nico Hischier young guns card. I was on the lookout for it and kept seeing it for 25-30 dollars online. I told myself I wouldn't drop that much money on a single card and lo and behold, I didn't have to. Also, with this particular pack, I got my first Vegas Golden Knights card.

Mats Zuccarello is a red foil parallel version of the Shining Stars insert series, and I'll be honest, not something I was expecting. This was probably the second best pack of the tin as there were also cards for P.K. Subban, Henrik Zetterberg, Andrei Vasilevsky (who could be a finalist for the Vezina Trophy this year) a really cool Kari Lehtonen card, and a nice horizontal of Pavel Zacha. That reminds me, I really hope the Devils can make the playoffs this year.

I mentioned the Shining Stars red parallel the last pack and in this pack, I pulled a standard Shining Stars card, this time of Jakub Voracek. I also got another card I was hoping for, that being the Marc-Andre Fleury Golden Knights card. He's had a tremendous year and is a really big reason the Knights are doing as well as they are doing.

Each tin also comes with a box topper. I was lucky enough for mine to be of Vladimir Tarasenko from the Winter Classic held in St. Louis. I haven't officially added Tarasenko to my list of players I collect but I think I'll do that at some point.

Moving on to the O-Pee-Chee blaster now. I really like the O-Pee-Chee cards but the one issue I have with them is that they come out so early in season, that by this point in the year, they're outdated. However, I did manage to find a few neat cards out of the batch, such as these. Nash is now with the Bruins, Panarin is still in Columbus as of last check, and the hockey card gods must really want me to collect Tarasenko.

Two cards for my Ben Bishop and Cory Schnieder collections. Braden Holtby is another player I've considered adding to my official player collection list.

Speaking of players on my official player collection list, it was nice to see these two get cards in the O-Pee-Chee set. The Doan card I guess could be considered a "sunset card" as I don't think he got a card in the regular issue Upper Deck set this year. Jagr did get a card in the main set this year as a member of the Flames. That's one I need to add to my most wanted list.

I got six of these retro style cards in the blaster, which equates to one every other pack since there were 12 packs in the box.

I also got these two mini's out of the box, which I wasn't expecting. Laine is a black border parallel of some sort, perhaps foil?

These are definitely foil parallels. The deal with the Henrik Lundqvist card is that you can put together a complete 52-card deck of playing cards with those style inserts. Now, I didn't know that there were foil versions of these so that's super cool. That's a card that I'll definitely slide into a penny sleeve in the hockey box to protect.

So that's some highlights from some late season breaks of early in the season products. Of these, I think I liked the O-Pee-Chee blaster better than I did the Upper Deck tin, mainly because I like the design better and this year's Upper Deck design isn't the best, but nothing can really beat the Nico Hischier pull though.