Make Less War And More Hockey Cards

Next round of Russian Hockey cards I got from Alaicans on eBay starts with 2012-13 and are going to be all Evgeny Kuznetsov.

This year the silver and gold paralles are a bit more obvious with the foil emblems across the photos.  Gold ones are serial numbered.  The backs are all the same.

There is a subset of Celebrations, which you'll see more of later.

A couple stat leader cards.  Nice to see the home and away uniforms for Traktor Chelyabinsk.

 

Each year there is usually a set of stickers issued along with the regular card sets.

These All-Star cards were in the first batch I got, but I'm showing them again for a complete idea of each year's cards.

On to 2013-14.  Similar design and parallel styles.

 

A game card that reminds me of the Attax that Topps put out a few years ago, which makes sense, since their logo shows up on these.

Now we're really getting fancy.  This year's All-Stars are very shiny with silver foil on the base, gold and red on the parallels, both of which are serial numbered.

Same with the Fastest Skaters.

 

Logo "puzzle" cards are neat.  There's a 9 card set for each team.  These are built for pages and binders.

 

Under The Flag inserts - players from the different countries.

I'm gonna cut it here since that's the last of his regular cards.  The next ones he has are in a Capitals uniform on American cardboard.  

The last post will be the coolest stuff.  Gamers and extra cards.

Pasteboard Power Tour 2022: Bel Air, MD

Tuesday brought what turned out to be the highlight of the week.  Stuart sent me a link to the Bel Air Sports Cards shop a while back and I put it on the list immediately while planning our tour.

It's about an hour and a half drive from my house, straight through Westminster and around the top of the Baltimore beltway.  It was well worth the trip.  I will be going back often.

Just inside the door, there is a big area of monster boxes of recent singles by sport, and a wall full of older sets.  Further in is the Card Bar, a long counter where you take your boxes and sift through them or break your wax.  They even offer free sodas and Gatorades, which helped me because Stuart never takes meal breaks in the middle of the day when we're in a shop.

Behind the counter (to the right in the photo above) there are several more rows of inserts and other singles, and at the far end are even more.  Vintage, 80's, 90's, 2000's +, they have it all.  They're open from 11 AM to 6:30 PM Tuesday thru Friday and 10-4 / 12-4 on the weekends.  The late close on the weekdays works well for me coming from such a distance - I don't have to get up before the sun.

Anyway, on to the loot!  I dug through mostly the insert boxes, but found a bit of everything.  And I'm sure I didn't get through all they had out.  And there is a whole back room that they can pull stuff from as well!

I attacked the big box of 1957 Topps they had early.  Most were $3 each and really nice.  

Stuart pitched in and dug me out all these baseball from 2003 Topps, 2004 Topps Fan Favorites, and 2006 Greats Of The Game.

I'm pretty sure I found these in their vintage football too.  I can't confirm that 100%, but I'm pretty confident.  I had stacked these up after the week was over and couldn't match them to the other stuff.  The price tags are similar enough to the '57s that I think I'm right.  Volney was an upgrade.  (He could be from somewhere else too).

Then I got into the football insert boxes.  I think I went through six or eight three row units.  Found a ton of this Prestige set including that Zeke insert I got before.  When I settled up, he just gave the totals to the big stacks I had, so I didn't have an itemized list, but these were most likely a quarter each.

More Prestige and then 2015 Score.  And a few of those crazy 2009 Philadelphia inserts. Knocking out listings left and right.

Some of the earlier 2000's inserts I've been after, and all the way back to the late 90's.  Plus an early 90's Joe Montana header card. Some of those E/X Centurys I put on my favorite sets list.

Among all those inserts I kept finding Washington football cards that I didn't have as well.  I actually brought my whole list binder and looked them up as I went.  Probably saved me several dollars and a few dozen dupes.

And finally, some non-sports that I got from them - but actually at the Chantilly show over the following weekend.  I've got about a dozen scans from that show, so I'll put these here.  They had every one of the remaining Charlie's Angels I had on my list.  But I messed up - #109 should have been #108, which was an upgrade anyway.  Will confirm that later.

Like I said, this is a great place to go digging for singles, which is what I like best about card shopping.  It's too bad I've shunned so much of the current year's offerings, I'd have spent a lot more time in the front area with the base cards.  But I still know that I'll have to go back a couple times before I'll have any idea that I've seen most of what they have to offer.  If you're in the area, stop in and sit at the Card Bar with Mel & the boys....

Mums ļoti Patīk Arī Hokeja Kārtis

 ...which is Latvian for "We really like hockey cards too!" (again according to Google translate).

Like I mentioned, I went back to eBay and searched the Latvian seller (alaicans) for Kuznetsov and Sergei Fedorov.  Then I pretty much bought one of each that I didn't already have.  Surprisingly, the shipping was only $5 base and a quarter for each additional card.  And they threw in a whole bunch of bonus cards too!

Most KHL base sets have a couple parallels, so I'll try to group those together.  I scanned almost every card individually - front and back - since most of them weren't on the TCDB.  But to keep this post under six miles long, I won't show all that.

Fedorov and Kuzy were apparently in the KHL at the same time.  They both have cards in the 2010-11 sets and for the next few years after.  So let's start there...

Here are the base cards from 2010-11 Russian KHL.  The silver and gold parallels can be distinguished by the logos in the top left and the text below the KHL league logo.

 

Fedorov's cards, front and back.  Colors are different since he's on Metallurg Magnitogorsk and Kuzy is on Traktor Chelyabinsk.  I also got the gold version of this one.

These are from the 2010-11 KHL Exclusive series inserts for the All-Star Game.  This is a separate product from the base set.  A lot of the base cards are relics.

 

 Kuzy also has this Super Skills All-star card.   Looks like he won the Shootout competition.

 

Front and back of the silver All-Star for Sergei.  Still missing the gold one of these.

 

The other insert set in the Exclusive Series is After The Game.  Shots of players outside the rink.  Sergei has one of the 18 cards in this insert set.  Nice writeup of his accomplishments.

Their 2011-12 cards get a little more colorful and are now made (or branded) as SeReal.  (Again, I'm assuming that is pronounced like "cereal".)  Got all three versions of both.

 

Here are the backs.  I'm glad they put the years next to the company logos since the copyright dates span five years.  And there's just enough english translations to understand all the stats and things.  The little badges next to the photos denote All-Star appearances, but aren't all-inclusive.

 

Kuznetsov has a Generation Next insert as well.  This is listed in the database as 2012 SeReal KHL All-Star Collection, which hides it from the listings of sets by year.  Those also include these two that I showed in my first post:

Think I'll stop here for now.  The next ones are 2012-13 and then some other miscellaneous stuff including stickers and a lot of other players.

Pasteboard Power Tour 2022: MD/DC Stops

Continuing on our pursuit of cardboard, we move to Monday the 20th of June.  

Our first stop was the shop next to McDonald's in the Cabin John Mall in Potomac, MD.  Potomac is the suburb of DC where all the multimillion dollar mansions are, so this is where the fancy people live.  

Hall Of Fame Cards usually has a decent selection no matter what you're looking for, although it may take you a little longer to find it.  They have vintage cards by set, but the more modern stuff is sorted in an area against the wall into the major stars.  That's not horrible, since we keep want lists with the stars names usually noted - at least when you get down to a few base or just the inserts.  But if you're looking for the other decent names or inserts, you're going to have to dig through a lot of little boxes.  Their stock is sorted by teams.

We spent from about 10AM to around 2:30 or so digging.  At one point we were both sitting on the floor by the stacks.  The owner said we looked like little kids.  We were more like old guys with bad knees or backs.  Luckily those wooden team boxes are only about 300 card size.

To be honest, I learned something after we went to this shop this time and then the others during the week.  This is the type of shop you schedule very late in the tour.  And that's because the goal would be to exhaust all the other places and then find what you didn't get here.  Because their pricing is reasonable, but you won't find stuff super cheap.  The one sign that discourages me from buying from a dealer at shows it that they get the book out when pricing things.  This owner does too, but usually it's not horrible.  I found several star cards and inserts and paid a buck or few for each one of them.

Picked up the Unitas Kellogg's just 'cuz it was there (and $4).  The other stuff, yeah Peyton Manning or Dan Marino inserts are reasonable at $3, or the rookies for a couple bucks.  No problem.  Brady for a dollar.  Sure.  I can live with that.  They've got the full retail overhead situation going, I understand.  

I did get one insert for this kind of price that I ended up duplicating later, but only for about a quarter I think.  Dang Cowboys...

Found a few baseball, including some decent but not fantastic '57s for $7.50 total. 

Then from there, we finally ate something and moved on to House Of Cards over near Silver Spring.  This is more of an auction type place (affiliated with Huggins & Scott) and a little more high end, but they have a nice store display (that last year apparently suggested an appointment to see).  Can't find any interior shots except their Facebook site, which I can't get into.  The store is located in a business park, rather than a full retail center like HOF Cards.

I didn't get a whole lot from them, but what I got was pretty sweet.  They have several boxes of half price vintage football...

The '58s and '68s are for my set builds, so it's nice to knock off a couple big names.  Lots of Unitas today!  Figured I could live with the tape stains for that much of a discount.  Got all three of the pair of '68 checklists - the second one comes in blue or green on the back - same price for all three ($10).  The Gifford was just because it was too cool to pass up.

Again, the '57s and '50s are for the sets, and the Posts were just 'cuz they were so cool.  I got another Nellie Fox later for someone else, which wasn't as cheap as this one.  Unfortunately, I didn't look at the back, which had a strip of packaging paper stuck to it.  Looked like it might have been an envelope seal or something.  I successfully removed it by dabbing water on it and lightly scraping it off, immediately drying the card as I went.  Should have documented that procedure.

House Of Cards is open until 7:30, which is the latest of any shop we visited.  Makes it nice when you can hit a couple places for hours at each place without rushing around.

Next time - A new place!  And one I'll definitely be back to often!