Trimming a little hockey off the want list

For some reason I decided to hit Sportlots last weekend; I guess the big chunks of cards I've been removing from my want lists prompted me to try and do some more pruning.

The 83-84 OPC cards that I pulled from my recent COMC order were very inspiring, and I decided to pick up a few more.

All the lower numbered cards from the 83-84 set featured the Islanders and Oilers, the teams that met in the previous year's Stanley Cup final.  When you have the two best teams up front, naturally there are going to be quite a few star cards, which on this first page features Mike Bossy and Billy Smith.  Most of the cards I bought off of my favorite seller Clint (ctcdork) thankfully were just a quarter apiece.

What's great about this time period is you'll have a lot of players that aren't wearing helmets, which was optional back in the early 80's.  No helmet means the player is a lot more visible, something that is slowly fading away with mandatory helmet/face shield combos for new players into the NHL.

What I just noticed while writing the post so far is that of the 22 cards from the 83-84 OPC set that I bought, only one of the players is wearing their home white uniform.

This is the next set that is going to be put in a binder and pages, so I'm going to have to take a look and see how many players are featured in their road unis.  If my memory serves me, most of the players are in their dark jerseys. 

I now have just under 70% of the 83-84 OPC set in hand, and I'm hoping to find a few of the remaining Gretzky's I need for a reasonable price so I can put this set to bed sometime in 2018.

I've moaned a bit before about the number of SP cards that Heritage baseball fields.  While scanning these 2013-14 OPC cards this evening, I thought to myself that OPC sets do the same thing.  600 cards in the set, and cards 501-600 are short printed.  But then I thought a little further and justified my angst against the Heritage SPs.

The 4 OPC cards above?  50 cents apiece.  Not bad.  Even several years later, I normally have to pay at least a buck (if not more) for Heritage SPs.  Heaven forbid if it's a name player, then you're up to a few dollars on the baseball side. 

Maybe that's why I'm more inclined to putting together the OPC run from the past decade as opposed to the Heritage sets.

I didn't scan them all, but I did take the time to show off 27 of the 54 2013-14 OPC cards that I bought for the 18 cent minimum price that Sportlots features.  These were all base cards, no SPs.  Not sure why I took forever to take an axe to the want list for this set.

These 80 cards matched the 80 that I received in a trade recently, which will be the focus of the next post.   A bit of a coincidence, although there are those out there who say that there is no such thing....

Thanks for reading, Robert