The Five most iconic Hockey Cards thread

[Rants Mulliniks]

Pacific never got the credit they deserved when it came to innovation. They were the first company to produce net cards and actually pin pointed the date and game of their game used cards.

Link your thread, I wants to read

Pacific made some of my favourite stuff for a while. I liked the "outside the box" thinking. Some of their cards were not exactly easy to make sure you didn't bend due to having so many pointed "corners".

My one and only hot box was Pacific Atomic. Every single pack had at least one jersey/patch with some having more than one. THAT was exciting!

 

[Rorschach]

Pacific never got the credit they deserved when it came to innovation. They were the first company to produce net cards and actually pin pointed the date and game of their game used cards.

Link your thread, I wants to read

Thanks bud, I'm thinking more and more I should re-write (I wrote it somewhere on an old PC that's retired somewhere, over ten years ago) and publish it for the first time. I still have the collection so it's no problem scanning the cards again.

Basically I was a frequent user of both Beckett and hobbyinsider and I knew a kid in his very early teens that was collecting. He totally understood the market on players, prospects, patches (number of colors, breaks, game-used vs. event used), autos (hard-signed vs. sticker) and all sorts of stuff like why one /10 card was very expensive and another /10 card of the same player and same year was worth trash.

But what he didn't know was how and why the hobby was like this so I made my top 10 list to help teach him as a visual indicator, since our hobby is so visual. And then as I was choosing examples, 10 ballooned into 50, chronologically.

Just as sort of an idea of the list, the first card was the 88-89 Topps - Wayne Gretzky "sweater card". The "last" card is the 05-06 Upper Deck Young Guns - Sidney Crosby.

For your Pacific example, I'm wondering if maybe I should do another list, top 10-ish of cards with innovations we wish the hobby would do more of/do again. I personally love Dufex cards and I think a LOT of people liked Pinnacle's Masks cards. Maybe couple that list with cards with innovations we hope never come back, like the cards with the peel on the front, lol.

 

[Rorschach]

Not a very expensive card by any means, but this was one of my favourite cards for the longest time

What a time to be alive and collecting. That set was so gorgeous and had so many good rookies and stars. And for the best player to be on the Kings...mmmm.

My personal favorite was this one, the promo.

 

[Rorschach]

Sid young guns is ahead of the cup. There’s more of them so more interest, plus the high gloss /10 is a potential million dollar card

Sid has a big four: Cup /99 RPA, Young Guns and all its parallels, SPA FWA /999 and the patch auto Limited /100, UD Ice /99.

I also really like the UD Rookie Update dual signed, but it's also somewhat of a gimmicky card, especially since they stopped making Rookie Update after that year and thus stopped making the Avery label dual-signed auto RCs only after a few seasons.

 

[Rorschach]

I sold my Jagr collection and the only card i kept was the 96-97 Upper Deck Game jersey card. Not Jagr specifically, but I feel like this jersey card across all sports changed the game.

The 96-97 UD S1 - Jagr GJ is in my top 50 list.

 

[Rorschach]

I loved UD up until the Pronger draft year, then dropped them until 2005 when the YG's took center stage.

Hated the collation tho. Upper right on the box had all the young guns in the early years, just buy the entire stack.

That was the 92-93 UD Hi numbers...I got into the hockey card hobby as an escape from the baseball card hobby. I started collecting opening wax packs for a quarter, back in 1980. I went through the hobby and got serious in 1985 when I moved to a new city and near my first card collecting shop and read my first price guide, CCP, understanding the value of rookie cards over star cards. I started following the Mets star rookies, Gooden and Strawberry, and became a Mets fan, including seeing them playing that incredible season in 1986 and winning the storybook 1986 World Series. Then I fell out hard of the hobby when I found out about the drug issues the team had.

Then Gretzky got traded to LA. Pro Set made the first higher quality hockey cards. And everyone from Score, Upper Deck, O Pee Chee (Premiere), Bowman, etc. made new card sets. And I switched from Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura to Steve Yzerman and Pat Lafontaine. My comic book friend also collected hockey so he and I became close...he would teach me who was who in the hockey world. I remember he was buying 80's OPC packs on clearance, four for a $1, hitting Hull and Yzerman rookies, etc. And we were both buying Upper Deck, trying to build sets.

Anyway, concluding that long-ass story, he quit the same time you did with UD. He thought of the hobby as collecting base sets. Getting a few inserts was nice too. But when in 92-93 they introduced multiple insert sets like the Gordie Howe Selects and the rookie hologram cards, he did the calculation and realized he could buy an entire case of cards and still not get all of the inserts so he quit.

 

[Rorschach]

Saw this on reddit. Is it really the only 'official' autographed Patrick Roy Young Guns card in existence, as someone wrote there?

No. This is a manufactured 1/1, what we normally call a "buyback". Upper Deck took on of their old cards (in theory they bought it back from a dealer, thus the "buyback" term). Then they got the star on the front to sign the card and then they numbered the card. In this case they only got one signed for a special occasion and they machine stamped it with a 1/1 number...most of these types of cards are hand numbered but this one was machine stamped. The special occasion was the 50 year anniversary of something...see the crooked foil logo under the Upper Deck foil logo.

Since UD just picked this card randomly and got it signed, they can do the same for any special occasion in the future, get the player to sign it, and call it a "buyback". So since they can retroactively do this at any time, this card is not treated like a truly special 1/1 card by the hobby.

 

[John Eichel da GOAT]

The 96-97 UD S1 - Jagr GJ is in my top 50 list.

I do have the yellow version too, which should be more rare than the black or white, but no way to find numbers.

 

[BostonBob]

As a Bruins fan I have to hate anything Montreal Canadiens related but I love the story behind this card:

The story goes that just a few weeks before OPC printed their 1974-75 NHL cards they were told by an insider that Jacques Lemaire was about to be traded to Buffalo. So they hastily added Buffalo colours to Lemaire's card just before they had to start printing the cards. But their inside information turned out to be wrong - it was Jacques Richard that actually got traded to Buffalo.

 

[mja]

These were the really hot cards in my day.

 

[Cubs2024wildcard]

Thanks bud, I'm thinking more and more I should re-write (I wrote it somewhere on an old PC that's retired somewhere, over ten years ago) and publish it for the first time. I still have the collection so it's no problem scanning the cards again.

Basically I was a frequent user of both Beckett and hobbyinsider and I knew a kid in his very early teens that was collecting. He totally understood the market on players, prospects, patches (number of colors, breaks, game-used vs. event used), autos (hard-signed vs. sticker) and all sorts of stuff like why one /10 card was very expensive and another /10 card of the same player and same year was worth trash.

But what he didn't know was how and why the hobby was like this so I made my top 10 list to help teach him as a visual indicator, since our hobby is so visual. And then as I was choosing examples, 10 ballooned into 50, chronologically.

Just as sort of an idea of the list, the first card was the 88-89 Topps - Wayne Gretzky "sweater card". The "last" card is the 05-06 Upper Deck Young Guns - Sidney Crosby.

For your Pacific example, I'm wondering if maybe I should do another list, top 10-ish of cards with innovations we wish the hobby would do more of/do again. I personally love Dufex cards and I think a LOT of people liked Pinnacle's Masks cards. Maybe couple that list with cards with innovations we hope never come back, like the cards with the peel on the front, lol.

The finest cards?

94/95 finest hockey is an iconic set. That's a big no bueno.

When you pulled the coating off a refractor those cards looked amazing.

 

[Rorschach]

The finest cards?

94/95 finest hockey is an iconic set. That's a big no bueno.

When you pulled the coating off a refractor those cards looked amazing.

They did, but then the scratched so easily...and then after that, Topps and other manufacturers thought that having coating is OK in the hobby. So then we had Select Certified, the first year of UD Ice, etc. Nowadays, everyone knows coating is not ok. The last set to do this was UD Trilogy and this was for the special plexiglass Frozen In Time cards but that's the only exception the last 20+ years.

 

[Habsfan18]

This mass produced set that seemingly had about a thousand cards was all the rage when I was a kid.

I loved the design and how colourful they were. And of course how easily accessible that whole damn set was.

 

[Rants Mulliniks]

This mass produced set that seemingly had about a thousand cards was all the rage when I was a kid.

I loved the design and how colourful they were. And of course how easily accessible that whole damn set was.

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I think it would take less time to list the non-error cards than the error cards in Pro Set. No idea who was responsible for quality control?

 

[Cubs2024wildcard]

This mass produced set that seemingly had about a thousand cards was all the rage when I was a kid.

I loved the design and how colourful they were. And of course how easily accessible that whole damn set was.

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Some Pro Set card is worth a decent amount of money, a bloody nose card that was fixed real quick.

If you got the first batch of PS hockey, you might have one.

 

[Cubs2024wildcard]

There's also the rumor Probert hated his first UD card which showed his eye all swollen and stitched up and tried to get UD to remove it.

I remember people charging five bucks for it back in the day when you could pick up a lot of ten of his rookie for five bucks in magazine ads