Nickel box finds at the card show

The monthly card show was last weekend and I was quite lucky to find a dealer that had several nickel boxes of cards, including hockey!

Yep, that's right, several boxes of cards that were priced at just 5 cents.

I found a chair, sat down and started digging.

Over 20 82, 83 and 84 Topps cards.  No slouches either for the most part, mostly names that everyone will know.

Gypsy Queen framed border cards, and a trio of Bowman gold parallels.   Trade fodder for team collectors at a nickel apiece is not bad at all.

Another gold border GQ card, a quartet of Larry Fitzgerald cards and 4 Blue Jays that I didn't have.  The Roberto Alomar fold outs card was something that I had never seen before.  The photo on the inside would have been great for a regular card...

I don't know about other hockey collectors out there, but I have really enjoyed the Upper Deck UD Canvas cards over the past few seasons.  Seeing these in the nickel box was fantastic for me, I took all of them that he had.  Even the dupe of Patrick Maroon in the first scan.

What initially enticed me to sit down was seeing these cards.   I have very few of the 81-82 OPC cards (bottom row), and I was hoping to find a bunch.  Alas, there were only 2 in there.  The 84-85 OPC cards on the top were all that he had as well.  But I did find a bunch of these...

I dug out 72(!) of the 1983-84 OPC cards that I needed, bringing my want list down to a paltry 40 cards to go.   I really  had no thoughts of finishing this set by the end of the year, but now that the set is down to a manageable number of cards, chances are I have this done before 2019 rolls around.  I do need a couple of Gretzky cards as part of the 40, but I know that shopping around will enable me to find the cards at reasonable prices.

I wound up pulling 175 cards out of the nickel boxes, including a dozen Joe Sakic's, 1 Mats Sundin and 1 Felix Potvin card...

Now there may very well be several dupes on the Joe Sakic cards, but I wasn't going to take the chance with the cards only costing a nickel apiece.

All this, was just the first hour at this table.   Next up are the 5 for $1 cards that I dug through for another half hour....

Thanks for reading, Robert