As another member said, it takes me back to the days when I would save my allowance and ride my bike to 7-11 to buy a couple packs of cards. I would ride that Huffy almost 4 miles each way, rain or sun, thinking the whole way about pulling a Stan Mikita or Bobby Hull or Bobby Orr or Guy Lafleur. I remember saving the gum up until I had enough to pack my whole mouth full of that chalky nasty goodness! Taking the Red Wing cards and shooting them with my BB gun in the back yard, or using the Wings as my "bike spoke" cards and I didnt care if they got ruined. :devil: looking back now, it makes me sick to think how many perfectly mint (and hella valuable now) Gordie Howe, Ted Lindsay, Alex Delvecchio, Etc cards I ruined back in the day.
I have gone through so many different collecting phases the last decade, collecting this set or that set or certain players, and then selling them when we got tired if them. Honestly, it's been a crazy decade and multiple times it became boring and tiresome, but now I think we have found our "niche", something my son and I are both very happy with and are having a ton of fun with. We thought about it, did a lot of research, talked to multiple people, and finally settled on building vintage Topps Hockey Sets and all cards graded by PSA and logged on the PSA Set Registry. We started with 1957/58 and 1960/61 because our two favorite Hawks (Mikita and Hall) have rookies in those sets. The 57/58 set is going to have every card graded PSA 6 or higher, the 60/61 set will be PSA 7 or higher. Once those are done, we will start 58/59 Topps (Hull's rookie), with all the cards except Hull in PSA 7 or higher grades. The Hull, do to the prices, will be a 4 or 5. Then we will move on to do all the other Topps sets prior to 57/58 and up to 1965. 65 is our cutoff for what we consider vintage, but we may expand to include just the Topps set with Orr's RC.
We have so much fun with these vintage sets, they are small enough to keep them semi-affordable even graded, but rare enough to make for a fun and sometimes frustrating chase.
. The cards themselves are so beautifully "plain", they have great stats, facts, and the fun trivia on the back. They include so many incredible players, hall of famers, that I feel so lucky to get to see play when I was a kid. Yes, as crazy as it may seem to people who grew up in the "modern" card era of game used and auto cards, and $400 for 1 pack with only 6 cards, but we a actually have fun and get excited when we finally find that Glen Skov or Bronco Horvath Topps card graded a PSA 7. It truly does bring me back to my youth, and, aside from being fun, I know for a fact they will also always be "valuable" and can be considered a true "investment". Something I can hand down to my son, and hopefully he will hand down to his son.
We always have something to chase by building these vintage sets, we don't have to bother worrying about release dates being pushed back or waiting on redemption cards to be made, but we can look forward to finding that 1960 common player we need who only has 7 or 8 copies of his card that are graded high enough to fit our criteria. So, in simplest terms, we love collecting because we love hockey, we love cards, I love my son and get to spend time with him doing something that doesn't involve a video game and we both enjoy the hunt, and quite frankly, I'm a cardboard addict.
