You've Got Mail #62: Sportscards From the Dollar Store

One of my goals is to take a trip to Canada sometime. To start with, it'd be a few days in Toronto for the Hockey Hall of Fame, either a Blue Jays or Maple Leafs game (depending on the season), and assorted other things. My main thing one day is to take a trip through western Canada and see places like Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg. Since I don't have the funds (or a passport) right now to do such a thing, I'll have to experience Canada vicariously through trade packages from everyone's favorite blogger to the north, Douglas from Sportscards From the Dollar Store.

Hockey is pretty popular north of the border, not so much down where I live though, but I do see the rogue Blue Jackets hat or shirt now and then. Speaking of which, these Blue Jackets cards are very cool, especially the Brandon Saad, which feeds my new addiction of "shiny cards". I haven't officially declared shiny cards as a mini-collection yet but in time, I might. The Jackets have trailed off recently  and are now floating in between as the #1 wild card seed or third place in the Metropolitan Division.

More Blue Jackets cards, this time of the Score variety. I like Upper Decks offerings every year but some of them can be on the expensive side when buying packs. I kind of miss Panini being in the hockey card game sometimes as they would have sets on the cheaper end of the spectrum, like Score. These are all nice but look at the Sergei Bobrovsky card. It's definitely a bit odd and I'm not sure why Panini would use a horizontal picture but use the vertical name stripe.

Speaking of Panini hockey products, here are a couple cards from the 2013-14 Rookie Anthology release. Each of Columbus home uniforms are represented with the blue one being their alternate. Personally, I'm partial to the white and blue jersey as the alternate just seems a little boring.

Hockey cards weren't the only thing that made their way down from the great white north, baseball and football were included as well. The Palmer card filled up the empty slot in the back page of my tiny football binder quite well and the other two cards went right into the Reds collection. I was pretty happy to see a Robert Stephenson Dayton Dragons card as Dragons cards are hard to come by.

There were also a good number of Reds from 2016 Topps Series 2 and Update. Some of these may be dupes, I'm not sure though. I know the Jay Bruce All-Star card is for sure. I'll need to do some sorting to double check on the rest of them.

Finally, this was the star of the show, a nice three-color swatch from former Bengals RB Mohammed Sanu. My football collecting has slowed down a lot recently but it's still nice to add a cool card like this to my relic and autograph box. 

Again, a big thanks to Douglas for sending over these cards. I'll have to find some more stuff for you to send out later this year. Two more packages to get through and then I'll be caught up on trade posts!

Card Show Report Pt. 4: Everything Else

Last part of the card show report!

While most of my focus of the show was baseball cards, I did manage to find some nice non-baseball stuff as well. Hockey stuff was in short supply but there were loads of basketball and football cards. I don't collect much basketball, if any at all, and I'm fairly selective on football cards but there were more than a few good deals to be had.

UFC cards I barely found anywhere, which isn't surprising as not a lot of people are into them. However when I stumbled across this Michael Bisping relic card for five bucks, I couldn't pass it up. Quite the coincidence that Bisping won the Middleweight title beating Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 the same day this card show was held.

Both these football cards came from separate vendors. First the Y.A. Tittle card came from a 50 cent bin. I don't see much of his cards around, then again I'm not really looking for them, but the ones I do see are old and quite expensive. The Walter Payton card has definitely seen better days but I gladly handed over a dollar for it to add it to my football binder.

Two nice hockey singles that came from the same 50 cent bin as the Y.A. Tittle card. Guy LaFleur is on my hockey PC list and Olaf Kolzig (aka Oly the Goalie) is a guy I remember from watching hockey during my middle school and high school years. If you look closely, both of these are serial numbered. Some great additions to the hockey binder

Much like the UFC cards, wrestling cards were definitely in short supply. I grabbed these out of a 50 cent bin. While I'm not a big fan of buying packs of Topps Chrome in packs, I'll grab singles as I find them. Paul Bearer was, and still is, one of my favorite characters ever. I saw a six-hour interview with him once and it was absolutely fascinating as the man had a wild career from starting out in the gulf coast region, to being a prominent manager in WCCW in Dallas, to the WWF managing the Undertaker. Sadly, he passed away in 2013. Speaking of the Undertaker, here's a card of the man who ended his WrestleMania undefeated streak, Brock Lesnar. In a pretty unprecedented move, he's stepping into the UFC octagon at UFC 200 for a one night only return to face Mark Hunt. That should be quite the interesting fight.

There was one vendor there with a box filled with discounted relic cards. While high dollar ones are out of my budget, I'll gladly dig through a discount box to see what I can turn up as there are always some fun things in there. Take for example this shiny card of Bruins goalie Tukka Rask and Mohammed Sanu of the Bengals looking really annoyed. That was my only Bengals purchase of the day. 

Finally, this was one of my favorite finds of the day for five bucks. The last table I visited had a bunch of discounted vintage for a dollar a piece and a huge box full of Starting Lineup figures for $5 each. This was the only hockey one he had and it's just a beauty. I love the colorful Oilers uniforms and the fact it comes with a miniature Stanley Cup trophy. Really just a great piece.

That's it for the card show report. I probably won't make it out to another card show for a while but I'll say this is one of the best hauls I've ever had, and I spent just a shade over $50 bucks for everything shown in all four parts.

Hope everyone enjoyed this. I'm taking a mini break over the July 4th weekend but there's some fun stuff coming up afterwards, so stay close!