First card of the 2025-26 season

Last weekend I went to the mall with my brother, and while I struck out at Target, I found some cards at GameStop. Them getting into cards has been a big deal on twitter but it's mostly graded stuff. I don't mess with that, I don't need anyone to think for me. So it was a pleasant surprise to see that had some real cards for sale, including a blaster of 2025-26 MVP, first set released for the NHL every year. Naturally I bought said blaster, and the first card of the year is this one:

Not a bad design. I like it. 

I find it pretty hard to believe we are in the 2025-26 season. I became a fan of stick and ball sports in the 1995-96 season so I feel pretty old now. If only Fleer, which was my first pack, still existed! I wish the hobby still looked like it did in the mid-90s. That was peak. I'm glad I got to experience it live. Of course it would be quite a while before I would begin collecting hockey, so I didn't get to experience that during the best days, unfortunately. Better late than never.

New People August 2025

 August is traditionally my least active month in the hobby. I don't really know why that is- it's usually too hot to do much anything else, although that was not the case this year. But for whatever reason August is always the month I get the least amount of cards. This year continued that tradition. I basically only did card stuff for 2 days on the entire month, one of which was buying some and one of which was scanning some. 

I did only 27 scans the entire month, and Cody Bass was the only new person scanned. This is actually the only card I have of him also, it was a gift from a friend. 

New People added was also small but it includes some pretty big names. Connor Zilisch is the biggest prospect in the sport to come up in generations. He's a Rookie of the Year candidate in the Xfinity series, and he's leading the points and has scored 8 wins, the most ever by a rookie...with 10 races left to go...and he missed one and a half races due to injury. It's already announced he's going to run for Cup Series rookie of the year next year, and everyone, myself included, expect him to contend for race wins pretty much instantly. Frankie Muniz is also a pretty big name, a TV and Movie star, he is running for Rookie of the Year in the Truck series, or he was before he broke his arm last week. He will probably miss the remainder of the season now because of it. He is chasing his dream to be a race car driver although the team he's with is not particularly good and the results just haven't been there. The cards of Muniz and Beers also added two new teams to my NASCAR collection, which is interesting. A third team was added that made it's debut last season with a veteran driver, Matt DiBenedetto. 

Also of note this month, the Buffalo Sabres became the 15th team in my NHL collection to reach 1000 cards. The Blues and Lightning are close, 4 and 17 away respectively. If I opened up all the packs I have stashed I know they would get there, but right now I'm more involved with my model stuff and probably won't get back into card stuff until it gets too cold to work on models.