20 cents each? Hell yes!

Saturday, I visited a store I don’t go to too often. It is not a card shop; rather, it is a store that sells a bit of everything. I never find sports cards there. That changed when I found a bunch of good hockey cards–for a mere 20 cents each!

Sifting through several thousand mixed cards–mostly Pokemon CCGs, baseball and non-sport–I unearthed 140 or so hockey cards. Many of them were rookies and inserts. Take a look at what I found:

11 2007-08 Upper Deck Young Guns – Two Bobby Ryan RCs, as well as Young Guns of Milan Lucic, Tobias Enstrom, Erik Johnson, Peter Mueller, Mayson Raymond, Rob Schremp and Villie Koistonen. Plus Jaroslav Hlinka and Tom Gilbert. All for 20 cents each.

21 2007-08 OPC Marquee Rookies – Mostly scrubs, but some good ones too, including Erik Johnson, Jaroslav Halak, Andrew Cogliano, David Clarkson, Mayson Raymond, Nick Foligno and Martin Hanzal. Also pictured above are two cards of Brett Sterling (regular and foil versions). Sterling is well-known to fans of the AHL’s Chicago Wolves.

6 2007-08 OPC Inserts – Two team checklists, a Season Highlights card of Evgeni Malkin, an In Action card of Roberto Luongo and two Stat Leaders cards. Fortunately, the two Stat Leaders cards were ones I needed for my set.

9 random rookie cards – Yes–the card in the upper left is a 2005-06 MVP Dion Phaneuf rookie card. The card next to it is a David Moss Ice Premiers RC numbered 287/999. The rest aren’t anything special, but will hopefully one day get traded to a fellow collector who is trying to complete some sets.

Some Stars and Inserts – Base and insert cards of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Alex Ovechkin, Ilya Kovalchuk, Vincent Lecavalier and Paul Stastny.

More Stars and Inserts – An Alex Tanguay Black Diamond Double Diamond and some various inserts from the 2007-08 Upper Deck set.

There were other cards I purchased too, but nothing special–Artifacts base cards, Black Diamond base cards and some “junk wax era” Classic Cards from the mid-1990s.

I guess there are two lessons here:

1. Sometimes you find things you like for a steal.
2. Sometimes you find things you like in the least likely of places.

Author: Sal Barry

Sal Barry is the editor and webmaster of Puck Junk. He is a freelance hockey writer, college professor and terrible hockey player. Follow him on Twitter @puckjunk View all posts by Sal Barry