Taking the Scenic Route

Everyone's favorite White Sox blogger, Jeff of 2x3 Heroes, is in the midst of sending out his annual "Tis the Season" packages. I was excited when I got my notification from the USPS that the package was on the way and it would be delivered in a few days. Well, after a few days, no package. I checked the tracking online and it simply said "in route to distribution center". Then, a few days later, the package popped up in L.A., then after a day or so in L.A. it made its way to San Francisco, and finally, after about 10 days of criss-crossing the country, a small priority mail box finally landed on my doorstep. To be honest, I'd kind of forgotten what I'd claimed in the annual year-end give away but it turns out the box contained a ton of hockey cards from all over the place.

The note from Jeff said I took a bunch of "meh hits" off his hands. These are some swell looking hits and I'm glad they're more jersey cards than autograph cards. If you can't make out who the players are on these three it's Ales Hemsky, Roman Horak, and Justin Schultz, unfortunately three names that aren't all that familiar to me.

One name that is familiar to me though is Rick Nash. Nash was the first player selected overall in the 2002 draft and could probably be classified at the first "homegrown" star of the Blue Jackets. 

This card is probably my favorite of the jersey cards included in the box. Glenn Anderson was part of the Oilers dynasty in the 1980s and early 90s where he won five Stanley Cups with the team and made four All-Star teams. He also won a Cup with the Rangers in 1994 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player in 2008.

Relic cards though weren't the only thing that Jeff included. He also put a huge dent in my team collections for hockey. There were six "team packs" in the box and each one was loaded with all kinds of miscellaneous odds and ends. I'll show some highlights.

First, a nice lot of Blue Jackets. Of all my team I follow, the Blue Jackets are the ones I honestly watched the least of last season.

Some nice Devils including a pair of Jagr's. One can never have too many Jagr cards. Too bad it looks like he might be done in the NHL for the forseeable future. Speaking of which, I'm on the lookout for the lone card he had with the Flames from the Upper Deck main set.

More Devils and some mid-90s action with Brodeur and Stevens.

Old school Oilers!

And also some newer ones. 

My Calgary Flames collection really got a nice boost.

My Shane Doan collection for the Coyotes pretty much tripled in size. Also, there were some Jeremy Roenick cards with the really, really old Coyotes uniform.

Team collections aside, there was a nice mixed bag of cards too with these Artifacts and Score cards. I never really buy much in the way of late season hockey releases so adding cards from Artifacts is very nice. The picture really doesn't do them justice.

There was also a really good grouping of 2016-17 Upper Deck, of which I had none in the collection. That'll also put the bow on this giant box of cards as well. Now, I just have to find the time to get them filed away.

Forgotten Hockey Cards

Along with the Pokemon cards that my wife and I sold off the other day, the same binder included her old hockey card collection from the early 2000's. I'm going to mix these in with my hockey card collection but here's a look at the best of what we found:

This is probably the coolest thing we found in the binder, a 2002-03 Phoenix Coyotes pocket schedule. My wife moved to the states from England right around this time so finding something from her early days in the states was pretty neat.

Here's a good batch of SP Authentic cards from the same time frame. Roenick and Zetterberg are probably some of the best ones from the batch of these.

I'm not too familiar with the players on these hologram cards but I will say they are pretty cool. While we didn't come across any "hits", these more than make up for that as we "oohed" and "aahed" over them for several seconds.

There was also a mixture of random singles, like the Bowman cards above and these Rookie Update cards, which I'm guessing have to be part of the Upper Deck flagship set from that year? There's some decent players here too with Vincent Lecavalier, Peter Bondra, Jose Theodore, and is that Marian Gaborik I see in a Minnesota Wild uniform?

Came across a bunch of Upper Deck MVP singles as well ... and yes, Patrick Elias is still playing for the Devils.

I'm not sure what year Topps stopped producing hockey cards but it couldn't have been long after this. I'm not sure what possessed them to do prune colored borders on their cards though.

Let's finish this off with some more Upper Deck products. The wood bordered cards are from a series/brand called Beehive. I'm guessing that was a throwback to some sort of old time hockey cards, like Gypsy Queen and Allen & Ginter are for baseball. The bottom has cards from two lines still going today, Upper Deck ICE and Black Diamond, even though both are definitely out of my price range for packs and boxes.

Going through the binder and checking out all these old hockey cards when we discovered them was pretty fun. Now to organize them and get them in the hockey binder.