Documenting History via Trading Cards
It was a fairly light month of scanning, as I got more in to the scale modeling aspect of my life as the temperatures warmed up. I scanned 378 cards, 26 of which were new people.
I don't think I've even seen a card issued for a team's LAST game. Of course, that makes sense because teams don't fail very often, thankfully. The last NHL team to fold was before I was even born, until, perhaps, this year.
The Arizona Coyotes have been poorly managed for longer than I've been in the sport. Just a couple of years ago they got locked out of their arena for not paying the rental bill, for example. For the past two seasons, they have been playing out of a college arena, which led to the road locker room being a tent in the parking lot. Yeah, just two of the more extreme examples, but their biggest problem is not having an arena capable of hosting major league hockey.
So they are probably done. Probably? Well, the current owner, IF he can get a piece of land, AND completely build a new arena ready for play by the 2028-29 season, will get the Coyotes restarted. Those are pretty big ifs and I am somewhat dubious it will happen.
For now, the contracts of all the players and the hockey operations have been sold to the new Utah NHL franchise, which will debut next year without a name. I will be calling them the CoyUties myself.
I watched the last Coyotes game on Center Ice. It has never been my favorite team but watching the last game made me sad, for the players, the fans, the team support staff and broadcasters....it was the saddest broadcast I've ever seen.
Now Topps has issued a card for the last game in the Topps Now set.
This photo was taken at the conclusion of the game when all the players came out to salute the fans. You can tell by the faces visible and the body language that it was not a particularly happy moment for them, despite blowing out the Oilers. It was truly the end of that era.
I'll be curious to see what the future holds- both for the new Utah team that will be made up of former Coyotes, but especially to see whether the Coyotes themselves can be restarted. Only time will tell.
After a couple of months with very few scans, I got back into my normal form in April, scanning a total of 889 cards, which is more than I did in all three previous months of 2024 combined.
Of those cards, 122 of them were new people never scanned before, 29 of those from the Parkside IndyCar box I purchased, which will be the subject of a forthcoming post, hopefully.
I've said before how much of a fan I am of the Topps Now NHL stickers. They have had a Serial numbered to 10 parallel since they started, but this year they added a 1/1 Gold parallel. I did not expect to ever get one, considering how rare they are, but today I did! Brayden Point's 1/1 Gold was the first card I saw when I opened this week's mailer!
While this is my second NHL 1/1, this one is a bit more special because I pulled it instead of bought it.
This is a big thrill for me and today would have been a great card day if I didn't realize I screwed up and missed National Hockey Card Day last week. It's still pretty good but now I'm happy and depressed at the same time.
Now a couple of months ago, my brother and I drove out to KFC to get some lunch. KFC is always good, but the parking lot was packed- they are in a strip mall and it was full on a Saturday afternoon. We had to park along the outer edge, facing towards the street. On the other side of the street, my brother spotted a card shop! So of course we had to check it out.
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It's not a large shop but he has some display cases and discount boxes and of course I went for them, naturally.
Everything else came from the discount box.
Where there were no NASCAR cards in the store, there were two packs of Sport Kings- an unlicensed multi-sport set that features high quality drawings of athletes which happened to have NASCAR people on the outside of the clear pack. There were other packs too, but they didn't have people from sports I collect. I like the set and wish I had gotten them too.
Overall, it was a very successful trip, and after we left the shop, we went and got the KFC, which was incredibly delicious as it always is. I actually spent more money in KFC than on the cards, too.
Even though this was back in February I have not gotten back or had KFC since then. I need to change both of those at some point....just always saving money.
It was a light month for scanning. I just didn't feel like doing it to be honest. I only scanned two pages, both from the brand new Indy Car card set from Parkside. Of course, since Indycar hasn't had a traditional card set since 2007, most of the people in the set are brand new to my collection.
There were actually more, but I also have a hobby box which I pre-ordered and I would rather use a photo of the person rather than of the car so I saved them, knowing I likely have a card of the person waiting to be scanned.
I hope I will find more motivation shortly. Ever since I got sick the most recent time, in February, I have just not felt like doing anything...it's led me to not accomplishing a whole lot, but at least I was able to meet my goal of getting at least something scanned each month, even if the grand total for the month was only 17 and a half cards. (I have to rescan the front of one because it slipped behind another card on the scan, but I haven't gotten to it yet)
I only did a handful of scans in January, and not a single one of them was anyone I had never scanned before. February would be different. I scanned 332 cards and of them, 42 were new cards...kind of. Sometimes I will hold back a scan instead of using it as the official first scan of that person- usually for one of two reasons. #1 is if the person's name is spelled wrong or shows the wrong person. (For instance, I've had a card scanned of Klim Kostin for almost three years now but won't use it as his sample card because they spelled his name "Klostin". The other main reason I will hold off is if the card is a minor league card and I know they will be getting a top level card. For instance I won't use a college basketball card when I know the player will be getting NBA cards in a few months to a year.
Tomas Jurco falls into the latter category. I scanned a card of him from the 2013-14 AHL set months and months ago- I posted it to the Set album in August 2020! - but I didn't use it because I knew he had made it to the NHL. I specifically remember him playing for the Golden Knights. When I realized I hadn't seen him in an NHL game in quite some time I looked him up...it turns out his time in Vegas was his last NHL appearances and that was back in the 2020-21 season! When I did my project where I finally figured out exactly how many cards I had of each person, I discovered that was in fact his only card in my collection. So since this was the first upload I've done since I discovered that earlier in the month, I included him in this month's upload even though, like I said, the scan was actually made back in August 2020.
Thanks for reading.
