When in Canada...

Instead of boring you to tears this week with an endless stream of Serial Insanity posts (there will be a few of those...), I'm going to try and post some of the cards I pick up during the week with the help of my iPhone.  No one has ever accused me of being a fantastic picture taker, but we'll see how it goes.

I was ready to start putting together another hockey set, and Captain Canuck's review of the recently released 2013-14 O-Pee-Chee hockey set only piqued my interest more.  So what's the first thing I do when I hit the northern side of the border?  Head to the nearest Wally world and pick up a blaster.

I've always enjoyed OPC hockey products.  I'm sure that there are very few Canadian lads who don't enjoy the annual release.  While writing this post I took a moment to reread the Just a Bit Offside post, and sure enough the cards I received in the blaster box followed a similar kind of pattern to the Captain's.

I received the standard 2 stickers (here we go with the photos....don't hate the cards, hate the photo taker...)

I guess Jimmy Howard's sticker is pretty common.

I also pulled 2 of the foil parallels, nobody exciting:

But the retro parallels that I pulled were interesting to say the least.  All 7 of them were #'d above 500 (the rookie group)

Easily the worst picture of the three, need a little more practice

Outside of Cory Conacher, I really haven't heard of any of these players. 

I also didn't pull any of the other insert sets, such as the rings or any patches/signatures.   What was most interesting is that the numbering pattern that the Captain mentioned in his post occurred in my box as well.  Where his hobby box was heavy in the 400-500 range, my blaster was very light in that group with only 3 cards.

1-100:  9 cards
101-200:  11 cards
201-300:  24 cards
301-400:  19 cards
401-500:  3 cards (including one of the 5 checklists)
501-600:  7 cards (including Jonathan Huberdeau)

The numbering of the cards I pulled also went in 5's as well.  The 1-100's held perfectly true to the numbering, as I pulled card #'s 4,9,14,19,24,29,34,39,44. 

This is definitely another set that I will put together, with great joy I might add.   But it would be nice to get a little closer to finishing a couple of the sets from the past 5 years that I haven't finished. 

Hopefully tomorrow's card show will help with that.

Thanks for reading, Robert