Archives, Pokemon, and Discounted Relics

I had a rare weekday off last Thursday and after doctors appointments for my wife (where we found out we were having a son) and my 4-year old (it looked like he had hurt his foot the night before but it turned out he was fine), we all went out for a bit of a celebration. First stop was some lunch at Chik-Fil-A and then we headed over to the card shop while we were out for a treat. 

First thing I found was a bin full of hockey relic cards. The cards were unmarked and had no price anywhere to be found. There were a bunch that I could have gone for but since there was no price marked I decided to play it safe and grab the Morgan Rielly and Patrik Elias cards above, which to be honest were the two best in the box. Turns out they were $3 each or 4 for $10. Had I known that, I would've dug a little deeper!

Next there was a box full of marked down vintage cards. I quickly flipped through a few rows and found this gem for $2. This Joe Nuxhall Kansas City A's card is actually one of my ten most wanted cards, mainly because it's the only card I know of that doesn't show Nuxy as a member of the Reds. For two bucks, I'll gladly cross it off the list.

There were TONS of packs he had on the shelf. I almost grabbed a few packs of Donruss but then I spotted Archives. While they were a little pricey at nearly $6 each, I couldn't help myself and get two of them.

My son wanted Pokemon cards so he got two packs of the newest release, Sun & Moon Guardians Rising. I'm not terribly big into Pokemon but I kind of enjoy the new season as it takes place in a tropical locale and the animation style has been changed up a bit. 

As far as what I got in the Archives packs ...

They were both kind of duds, totally not worth nearly six bucks each. The first pack netted me an Eddie Matthews base card and a Nolan Ryan Bazooka insert so that's kind of cool.

The highlight of the second pack in the Monte Irvin card. The Pettitte card is a duplicate so it'll go in the trade box to be sent out in PWEs the next time I sent out a mass mailing (probably Labor Day-ish).

Out of the Pokemon packs, my son got this shiny Mimikyu card. If you're not familiar with Mimikyu, it's a creepy, mysterious "disguise Pokemon", and it has a hatred for Pikachu that has yet to be revealed. 

And that's another trip to the card shop in the books.

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.