About four years ago when my Thrift Treasures series began I discovered a local thrift shop that often sold cards 10 or 20 at a time for $1. Usually the store would receive boxes of cards and they’d dump them into some large plastic container. The price varied — as I noted earlier — depending on the cashier. Either way, the price was hardly something to quibble over. I mean where can you select the cards you want and pay either a nickle or a dime a piece?
Anyhow, that store is still there. It’s still open. It still has bins of cards. Problem is they have not had anything new in the boxes in almost a year. Every time I’d returned to the bin, I’d see the same stacks of 1986 Topps football and 1991-1992 Pro Set Hockey that’d been pilfered dozens of times over.
But that changed this week. I stopped in and it appears that someone dumped a small collection of hockey cards (not my forte) and some random 1996 football stuff. Go figure.
I dove into the bins and spent about 30 minutes shuffling through thousands of commons — including a large majority of which were the aforementioned Topps football and Pro Set hockey. All I came out with was 20 cards that I purchased for a single dollar. And even though hockey isn’t what I collect, I figure I should be able to flip them for something else that I might actually want. And it that fails, then at least I saved these from getting scrapped. Yep, I’m a hero like that.
So, without further adieu, here they are, the 20 cards that Cardboard Icons saved from the landfill!
Lets get these out of the way: I didn’t Neid these … (knee slapper!)
The great thing (I’m kidding) about the 1990s was the abundance of unlicensed cards. Actually, in their own way they were kind of fun. For team and player collectors who were about a decade away from seeing the world of parallels upon parallels and hits, they liked to have new issues to chase. Well, collectors of then super prospect David Neid of the newborn Colorado Rockies had a limited release to chase in this small Pro Motion set of what appears to be composed of four cards. The cool part: they’re serial numbered to just 10,000 copies! I guess that was a magic number in the early 1990s, that’s what all the Donruss “Elite Series” inserts were limited to.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, 1991 Topps may have had the best photographs in recently memory of any base set. That said, this Oscar Azocar image featuring him supposedly balancing a baseball between two bats always captivated me. Funny thing is I look at this card now and I can clearly see the dowel that holds that ball to the bat. It should be noted that this card would be even greater if it were his rookie card. It is his first Topps card, but Azocar had rookie cards in 1990 Fleer Update and Score Traded. Grrrr.
Quick hitter: remember these throw away offer cards? I actually like them because when I was a kid I never took the time to look at them. Now I continue to hope that I find weird Topps items like this hat in a local thrift store. I actually wonder if anyone actually ordered these …
Moving onto a pair of football cards:
Can’t leave this 1995 Action Packed Steve McNair rookie card behind, right?
And this 1996 Score “Field Force” parallel (feels like paper, not glossy) Jay Novacek had to come home with me.
It should be noted that the reason I kept digging through these boxes was the abundance of 1996 football cards. Why you ask? Well, I was hoping there was Ray Lewis rookie card just sitting there. Clearly there wasn’t.
And now onto the hockey portion of the post … where, oddly enough, is where I spent the majority of my 100 pennies!
Rookie cards. Who needs a 1990-1991 Upper Deck (American) Owen Nolan or a 1997-1998 Olli Jokinen?! Love that Nordiques logo by the way.
How about a 199601997 Starting Line-Up Peter Forsberg?
So, the title of this post is “DuFex! Dufex! DuFex!” Here’s Why! Nine 1994-1995 Pinnacle “Rink Collection” DuFex parallel cards. No big names here, but check out that badass redemption cards. Possibly the best-looking redemption card I’ve ever seen.
Total cost for these Treasures: $1
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