pretty big hockey milestone

 Although I have not had much motivation to write, I am still doing card stuff almost every day. And that stuff is mostly in the form of scanning, which as I've well documented in previous posts is one of my favorite things to do. 

Today I hit a pretty big milestone in scanning, as I've scanned my 20,000th NHL Card! 

It turned out to be this Mikael Backlund card from 2020-21 Parkhurst. 

Ever since I began collecting the NHL, which is just a month short of 8 years already, I've been storing all the NHL scans in one folder. I assumed I would have to break them up into year folders like I did for the NBA and NASCAR, but that happened on my old computer, which maxxed out at 16000 items per folder. My current computer obviously doesn't have that limitation, since after adding the November scanned cards I was at 19726 scans in the folder. I knew it was likely going to see me hit the 20000 mark during December, but then I did a big batch of NBA and Non-Sports cards after a big batch of hockey. After the last batch I was 17 scans away but I have found that planning scanning isn't as fun as random scanning so I wasn't going to force it...then I finished that box and opened up the next box to work on and what do I come across but the entirety of the 2020-21 Parkhurst cards I got in trade on the Database several years ago and hadn't scanned yet. Backlund happened to be the card that was the 20,000th. 

While this is #20000 for the NHL, this isn't #20000 for hockey.   I have 7 cards from international leagues, 450 for minor leagues, and 39 for national team only sets, which means I'm basically at 2/3rds of my entire hockey collection scanned at this point! I have 31thousand something cards in my NHL collection, although that number will probably go up at Christmas since that is my #1 card receiving day of the year, although if not, that's OK too. 

I'm starting to feel like the end is in sight on the scanning project. There's still years ahead of me but the scanned cards now outweigh the waiting to be scanned by a significant margin...I estimate that I have only about 1/4th left to scan or less. Of course I also estimated that I would finish scanning everything in 2016, so my estimating skills are poor at best, LOL. I'm actually a bit worried about what I'm going to do when I finish scanning everything. That's so much of my life now for so long, I don't know what I'll do with my time once I finish. I'll think of something, that's a problem for another day, another year...for now I got back to editing scans. 

Utah Hockey Club joins the collection, history of 1-year only NHL Teams

 It's always exciting to me when I can add a new team to the collection. Even though it's really just the Arizona Coyotes in a new place, any team name change counts as a new team, with a new album on the Cardboard History Gallery. It's not something that happens every day, much rarer than adding a new person to my collection. 

The 2024-25 Topps Now set is the first release to show images from this season, and this is card #3 in the set- my first Utah Hockey Club card. 

and card #4 is a team card, which I always enjoy and specifically search for. 

The third week brought my third Utah card, and this is my first card of Lamoureux as well, which means it will be the first card showing Utah in the Alphabetical Directory. 

Utah is playing without a name this year and will introduce the actual name of the team next season. So Utah Hockey Club will be pretty obscure in the grand scheme of things. There are only 5 previous team/name combinations that were one year only, and the most recent was the Brooklyn Americans all the way back in 1941-42! Of the six, Utah Hockey Club was the only one that is planned to be one year only. 

The others:

Brooklyn Americans, 1941-42. Formerly known as the New York Americans, the team was renamed the Brooklyn Americans for the final season, despite still playing in Manhattan, but couldn't survive the Depression and WWII. When the team folded it created the Original Six era. There had been 10 teams before the Depression.

Montreal Wanderers, 1917-18. The rarest team in NHL History, lasting only 6 games into the very first season of the league before their arena burned down, never to appear again. (The team dated back to 1903 pre-NHL)

Philadelphia Quakers, 1930-31. The team was struggling as the Pittsburgh Pirates, and moved to Philadelphia to try and salvage the team. It failed, and this was the first of 4 teams to fold as a result of the Depression.

Quebec Bulldogs, 1919-20. Moved to Hamilton and became the Tigers after one season. Playing only 24 games as the Bulldogs, the Utah Hockey Club has already played more games (25 as of this writing) than the Bulldogs did.

St. Louis Eagles, 1934-35.  Had been the original Ottawa Senators, which was a successful team in the early days of the NHL, even winning four Stanley Cups. Holds a unique place in NHL history on two fronts; it was the oldest team of the 4 that the league founded with, dating back to 1883. Secondly, while the team only played in the NHL for one season it actually continued on until 1954 in other leagues, what was known as semi-professional. That format of hockey that is not really around anymore, replaced by the AHL-ECHL format. 

All five of the defunct team logo cards come from the excellent 2004-05 In the Game Franchises set. 

While hockey cards have been produced almost continually during the NHL's existence, the early cards are rare and expensive. All of the one year teams also existed long before I was born, let alone collecting! With three Utah cards in the collection, they have already passed or tied all but one of the 5 previous one year only teams in my collection, and Brooklyn has only 4 cards so it's only a matter of time before they have the lead. The Montreal Wanderers are one of three teams that have only one card in my collection, the other two being the previous names of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Arenas and St. Patricks. Unfortunately I was unable to find a box of the In the Game Franchises Canadian series to purchase which has the only cards of these early teams I'll likely ever be able to add to my collection. 

New People November 2024

 November was a fairly light scanning month. My desire to work on models returned so I did that for most of the month instead of scans. As such, I only scanned 414 cards. 

32 of them turned out to be new people, and as I predicted, the majority of them were indeed from the Haunted Hoops box. 

The 2024-25 Topps Now cards (stickers) also started arriving and added the first 5 new people from the current season for either the NHL or NBA, the latter of which I have not gotten any 2024-25 cards from yet and don't even know if they have been released. 

These were the people who joined my collection in November. While a lot of them appear in the scanned screenshot as well, not all do- I got myself a box of the Topps G-League set but am holding off on scanning them for now. I'm holding out for the Heystack system, which will hopefully be sometime in 2025. It's not really up to me but up to technology becoming available. Ever since the NY Fanatics Fest I've been setting aside any card with foil of any sort on it for the day when I can get my hands on one of those machines. There's still plenty of foilless cards awaiting their turn to be scanned, so even though I am really looking forward to getting those G-League cards properly documented, I'll wait. 

10 Years of Cardboard History

 Can you believe this has been going on for 10 whole years now? When I started Cardboard History back on November 22nd, 2014, I actually didn't expect I would be able to keep it going this long- I do have a tendency to start projects and trail off on them, never finishing them or even working on them again. 

But here we are in 2024 and I'm still going- even if I'm not "going strong" right now.

SO MUCH has changed for me in the hobby since I started this. Nearly everything has changed since I began this website, but while some of the changes I would prefer not to have had to make, overall I actually enjoy the hobby more now than I did back then. The most important changes:

• I didn't collect or watch hockey
• set completion was my only real goal
• I did not know how many different people I had in my collection
• I did not even consider a project of getting at least one card of every person to get one in my sports, because I did not even know it was possible to figure that out!
• I did not know how many cards I had
• I did not know what COMC was
• I had not been to a card show since 2004
• there were no local card shows to attend
• I did not believe I would ever get to a National
• I had not even envisioned the Cardboard History Gallery yet
• I did not own a card from the 1800s
• Press Pass still existed
• I was an avid Star Wars fan & collector
• repacks were readily available and my favorite way to grow my collection
• I had never opened a case of cards

Personally some pretty big things have happened since I began this too:

• I began a series of Adventures with my brother
• I have now visited 35 states (12 when Cardboard History began)
• I have now seen 3 of the 4 big man-made things that I consider the main things I wanted to see (Mt Rushmore, St. Louis Arch, Statue of Liberty)
• I got to enter a car show as a participant, achieving a lifelong goal
• I got to visit Roswell, New Mexico, something I've wanted to do since I was a kid
• I won a gold medal/1st place for my modeling, twice although I was the only entrant one of those times
• I got to see a cuneiform tablet in person, twice
• I got back to Lake George, my favorite place in the world. When I started this I was under the impression that I would not ever be able to return due to health reasons
• I walked around Manhattan and visited all five boroughs of New York City
• I got to the New York International Auto Show
• I completed my project of building one of every car number in 1/64 NASCAR Diecast that I began in 2005
• I returned to collecting 1/64 NASCAR diecast after having to walk away in early 2014
• I attended a pavement/road course race
• I saw a professional basketball arena in person
• I was named Head Automotive Judge at my club's scale model show
• I got a smartphone
• I took my first boat ride 
• I got a permanent modeling workspace

Obviously, for this website, becoming a hockey fan and collector is probably the biggest change. Since I got into hockey, it has become a part of every single day of my life, and going forward it surely will be. Even when I am not working on card stuff, I'm still watching hockey pretty much all the time. 

Creating the list of all the people in my collection was one of the first things I did after I started Cardboard History, circa 2015, and that would become one of the major driving forces of my collection, especially as my unhappiness with what Panini produces has led me to shift my focus from set-building-above-all to my Names Project, the somewhat clumsy name I've been calling my project of getting at least one card of every person to get one in my three major sports I collect. I've mentioned it before but that project feels more like being an actual historian of my sports than just focusing on base sets did. 
I actively seek out cards of people I don't have yet. For me, when I open packs, I am not chasing hits- I'm chasing my first card of somebody, anybody. When I am at a show or shop, whether I have a card of that person or not is often my deciding factor in which cards I buy.

Even though I don't actively collect baseball or football, or other miscellaneous sports, I still get a thrill when I get some cards from those topics and it's a new person not yet represented in my collection. At the time I'm writing this, I currently stand at 17,828 people listed, although there are a couple of names that I can't actually track down a card of them at the moment- I suspect that they are typos of people in sports I'm not knowledgeable, or come from the Sports Illustrated for Kids cards that I've misplaced since I wrote the list of who was in my collection back in 2015. It's probably closer to 17,775 people if it turns out they are all typos or mistakes.

One thing that has almost completely dropped off is my project of getting at least one card from every major set. I still care, I still document it, and I will still grab a card from a new set if I'm going through a stack at a show/shop, but the importance of that has dropped off significantly, for two main reasons- one being that the Names Project has surpassed and replaced the Sets Project, but mainly because after I went through and bought an example of almost every set on COMC for NBA, it took away almost all the fun of getting a card from that set naturally- not as a single. It happened several times and the best I can put it into words is that it made it anti-climactic. The joy of getting a missing set naturally was taken away by my efforts to force it. I've actively NOT done that with hockey since I started collecting it for the most part. I have hunted down some vintage cards, but those are sets I know I'm not likely to find locally/get in trade. I do have a list of the sets I don't have for hockey, but I'm not actively going and just buying the cheapest card available for the set like I did for NBA. I feel safe to say I will in fact never do that again, neither for the NHL or the NBA sets that have come out since I did that. 

One thing that has not changed has been my love of scanning cards. That is still one of my favorite aspects of the hobby, and the labeling and uploading them is, in fact, more fun for me than actually adding the cards to my collection. The scanning project- which I originally estimated I'd complete in 2016 (!), led to the creation of the Cardboard History Gallery, which is my actual favorite part of card collecting. I launched it on my birthday in 2018 and I finally finished building it in late 2022. It is my website where every single set, season, team, person and subject has it's own album. Want to see what I have of any person? Simply look up their album. Want to browse a team's history from the earliest days to the present? I can do that. Want to look through all the Marvel Cinematic Universe cards? I can do that too. Of course every single topic has more cards waiting their turn to be scanned. The scanning process is fairly slow, but I do enjoy it so I don't mind. 

Doing my monthly upload- which I begin on the first of every month - has become my driving force in the hobby, and most fun thing. Seeing how the numbers in each album grow, seeing the newly scanned cards automatically slot into place (a service provided by my web host), seeing how long it's been since I've scanned something new for any random set, seeing how many new people I scan in each month- I love it all. One thing I didn't even plan for but has provided me lots of enjoyment has been seeing if a scan makes it onto the first page of team albums. I don't know why that brings me such enjoyment, but it does. Building the website, in all honesty, brings me more enjoyment than actually adding the cards does, as I said. The website updates have made getting the cards more a means to an end rather than the main focus. 

I do not know what the next ten years will bring. I do know I will still be in the hobby, and I will still be doing at least one post a month as I document who I get scanned for the first time. Where will my collection, and my adventures take me? I don't know. I could never have imagined taking on an entire new sport when I started this thing, but now it's a major part of every day. As I type this I am watching a hockey game, and I can see more than a dozen hockey cards waiting their turn to be scanned. 

Will I have completed scanning everything? It's hard to say. If I stopped adding new cards I would say likely, but the odds of me stopping adding new cards are 0 percent. I fully expect NHL to overtake NASCAR by the end of this decade, let alone 10 years from now, if for no other reason than there are more of them available. (The NHL gets multiple 500 card sets a year, NASCAR gets 1 200 card set and that's pretty much it. Plus, hockey still has thousands upon thousands of cards from the past I don't have yet). I could even see it happening by the end of 2025 at my current rate of adding cards to my collection. 

My ultimate goal is still to have a museum and hall of fame for the hobby. I do not know if I can ever make it happen for money reasons mostly, but it's all working up to that. If I can pull it off it would be the greatest and largest thing I've ever done. I just don't know if I have the funds and wherewithal to pull it off. Only venturing into the future will find out. 

Finally, I want to say thank you to all my readers, and especially those of you who leave comments. I didn't expect to get readers, I figured this would be more just something to help me not forget what I was doing, but I really appreciate those of you who have stuck with me, have enjoyed what I have to say, and make it feel like I'm not just "screaming into the void". I can't say for certain but there's a good chance I would have lost interest if there wasn't a small but vibrant card blogosphere. 

On to the next decade of Cardboard History!

Major, Major Milestone

 I knew it was coming but I didn't know when it would be. It was a long journey to get to this point, starting all the way back in February 1996. I knew I would hit it when I got my mail on November 8th, 2024, but I couldn't do it right away....the milestone? 100,000 unique NBA cards! 

Although NBA doesn't play as large a role in my life as it once did, it's still a big part. I'm still very actively collecting the NBA and I really wanted to get some of the Haunted Hoops set Panini made for this Halloween. I've been very critical of Panini over the years, but they did a great job with this. The cards are cheap, bright and fun, everything cards should be! I had to resort to Ebay to get my hands on a "box", which is actually just a really big pack with 40 more packs inside. They arrived to me on November 8th, but I had to scan them large pack before I could open the regular packs- and I had stuff on my scanner while I finished my monthly upload. I finally finished that on the 9th, and then scanned and opened the cards and entered them into my Excel collection chart, where I determined which card was #100,000. It turned out to be #40, Jusuf Nurkic. Of the 100,000 NBA cards I have, it is the 23rd of Nurkic. 

There were a LOT of new people to my collection in this box. NBA cards have gotten very hard to get locally, and almost all the players that have entered the league since 2020? About 60% of them were not yet present in my collection. This one box went a big way towards fixing that. Considering one of my main collecting projects ever is getting at least one card of every NBA player to get one, it was a big boost. This set also has photography from after the trade deadline of the 2023-24 season, so all of the players who got traded at the deadline or changed teams before the 2023-24 season appear with their new teams for the first time in my collection here too. I don't know how many people joined my collection for the first time yet, but I will soon, since I've pulled out all the new people to scan first. That will be revealed to me in full when I do my monthly upload starting on December 1st. I estimate it's more than 30 people in only 117 cards. I have enough cards now- and so many people, closing in on 20 thousand, that I can't remember who is actually in my collection 100% anymore, especially if I only have 1 card of them and it's not scanned yet. 

It's funny...back in 1996, my Mom gave me a pack of basketball cards as a gift for Valentine's Day, knowing that in my school, where she volunteered more than 10,000 hours, a lot of kids collected cards and I did as well, but I was collecting NASCAR and Non-Sport only...everyone else was collecting NBA. She got me those cards so I could have something with my friends to trade with. Later that night, I found a game on TV- Knicks and Hornets. I was hooked, and basketball cards became the biggest deal for me for the longest time, until I burned myself out in 2006. I returned in 2012, now considering the break I took one of the bigger mistakes of my life, but I am wise enough to now know that I will never fully walk away from something I love ever again, a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way. 

Of my friends who were collecting and trading back in 5th grade, I'm still in contact with most of them, at least loosely via Facebook...not a single one stayed in the hobby. I am the only one. 

My extreme, obsessive documentation started after I hit 25,000 cards...or at least when I thought I did. I didn't have the collection totals fully proofed and accurate until I finished typing everything in to my Excel charts earlier in 2024, but I'm counting it as accurate. 

A timeline of major milestones:

• 1st NBA Card- February 14th, 1996. 1995-96 Fleer #220 Sam Cassell
• 50,000th NBA Card - April 5th, 2003. 2002-03 UD Glass #75 Hedo Turkoglu
• 75000th NBA Card- February 14th, 2014. 2012-13 Panini Brilliance #175 John Salmons
• 100000th NBA Card - November 9th, 2024. 2023-24 Haunted Hoops #40 Jusuf Nurkic

Will this be the last Major Milestone for the NBA? There's the possibility that it is. Regular milestones are every 1000 cards, the next Major Milestone will be 125000. I simply don't add as many cards as I once did, my collection is advanced enough now that adding new cards isn't as easy, but the biggest hurdle is that they simply aren't making as many cards as they used to. I can't collect what doesn't exist. I don't enjoy the Chrome cards which is what the majority of Panini's current products are, and when Topps gets the license back in a couple of years, they are no better with making everything chrome all the time. Even if I got the complete flagship Hoops and Donruss sets every year, that's only 550 cards- and I've never completed a Donruss NBA set, and I have not completed a Hoops set since 2016-17, so the odds of that happening are slim, let alone every year. I am not trying to be defeatist or anything, but I'm just realistically thinking that it may not happen. Whether it does or doesn't I don't really mind. I've built a collection that even without my personal bias of it being mine, I think I safely say without hyperbole is nothing sort of incredible, not to brag. Looking through all the NBA history I've got documented on cardboard is without a doubt more comprehensive than the Basketball Hall of Fame, and documenting history is my main reason for collecting and truly doing everything I do- photography, model building as well. Writing this blog also comes from that- thus the name, Cardboard History. 

One weird thing about the 4 Major Milestones I have documented? 3 of them were purple based teams, with two being the Kings and one being the Suns. Not a single one of them was planned, all of them were from a pack that I opened. 

New People October 2024

 October saw a lot more scanning that I expected, with 958 cards scanned. Of them, 136 were new people.

There are some pretty big names in there, too, especially in the non-sport, music category. 

I also hit a pretty cool milestone. Miscellaneous sports hit 1000 people scanned! Of the 7 major categories, it becomes the 5th to reach the 1000 mark. Non-Sport, which I actively collect but doesn't get many cards, is the lowest number of people, with 817. Baseball has not hit 1000 scanned yet, sitting at 877 after October's additions, but will- I have more than 1000 in my collection, I just haven't scanned them all yet. My records show that I have more than 1300 different people for Non-Sport, so I guess I really need to get busy scanning them! (of course, I'll get to them whenever they come out of the boxes- it's more fun for me to grab a random box to work on scanning, then going and specifically looking for one) 

Although I don't know who the 1000th person to enter my collection for miscellaneous sports is, I do know who was the 1000th I uploaded into the album.

I have not a clue for sure, but I'd bet at least 50% of the people in the Miscellaneous Sports section come from the SI for Kids magazine, as this one did as well. I scanned three months' worth of the publication in October, providing 16 of the 17 people added in the Miscellaneous category. 

Here are the new people I added this month.

The largest contribution of new people came from the WNBA rookie set I ordered from Panini Instant, which was 14 cards. All of the NBA players and the single NASCAR driver came from the blasters my Mom gave me for my birthday. There is one obvious mistake that I need to fix here, in that William Fargo is listed as WNBA, instead of Non-Sports. William Fargo was one of the founders of Wells-Fargo, and got a card in the Pieces of the Past Historical Premium Edition that I got. 

Breaking Down the Breakdown Box

I finished listing the cards I showed in the previous post from Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown. I'll take anything, and he had some stuff he wanted to get rid of, so it worked out perfectly!

He got my baseball collection over 1000 cards, before the box I had 901, I'm now at 1759! I know I have a couple more I've misplaced over the years as well, but I'll count that for now.

I also had 87 different baseball sets in my collection, now 216 are represented.  I'm not going to go crazy trying to chase down an example of every set like I did for NBA and NASCAR but it is fun to see how many I can get, just by taking the cast offs from other people's collections.

I also now have most of the Topps flagship sets in my collection. I am missing pre-1957, 1984, 1995, 1998, 2003 and 2005.

Working on these cards made me truly realize how good you baseball collectors have it. When Panini can't be bothered to give us a flagship set larger than 300 cards for a 450 man league, you guys are getting 600 or more cards on a regular basis. My preferred sport has not had a card set hit 500 cards since 1993-94, and my 2nd sport (NASCAR) has never gotten any larger than 340...ever. Topps designs may not always be great but at least you have the cards to chase.

In the final tally, it moved into second place for most new cards with a day, with 2827 new cards. I got 476 new baseball people for my collection, 164 new football people, and some others in other categories, bringing my collection total to 9765 different people..wow! I have a post I wrote up about my march to 10,000 people but I never got around to posting it. I really need to do that...

My favorite, as I mentioned the other day, is the Elton sketch, but since I posted that already, even if just a photo, here are my favorite baseball and football cards, respectively.

2013 Topps Update Emerald #US3. This card looks great in hand, even better than it looks in scan. Green has always been my favorite color and this really pops! It was one of the last cards out of the box and it's one of my favorites.

 2011 Topps Chrome X-Fractor. One of the very first cards out of the box-literally the second one I saw- was this one. I've always loved Refractors, and I've always loved parallels of refractors. This is my first non-NBA Refractor.

Editorial note: Another post I never finished writing, this has been sitting in my drafts folder since November 2016. I kind of trailed off because a lot of the cards were naked ladies which I will gladly collect but don't really show on the blog. Another reason is that a lot of the cards were already done on the Database which meant at that time I set them aside to work on getting things done that needed to be posted there. As I'm no longer contributing to the Database I now regret doing it that way but it's in the past and can't be changed. I'm still working through my cards and the vast majority Gavin sent me are still waiting for their turn to be scanned, 8 years later. Slow but steady I'll get there eventually, but I'm doing it in the way that's most fun for me- completely at random. The boxes are all labeled as to scanned or not scanned. and I'm working through them by simply grabbing a box that has not been scanned and working on scanning it. In theory, anyway. Most of the time I'm just trying to stay caught up with new additions and rarely ever actually grab a box of older stuff to scan. I don't think I've done it even once in 2024 despite being a year with a LOT of scanning in it. 

Anyway, thanks again Gavin!