Taking Inventory

My card collection is once again organized, and due to time and space restrictions I will probably call it complete once these spaces are filled. I can't plan a whole lot beyond the next month or so, and I can't keep making $10-20 sports card purchases every few days. But I can keep detailed records of what I have room for, so I don't add anything I can't squeeze into a box or binder.

This Kevin Dineen Topps RC arrived Saturday along with some other Whalers and Devils from two of my Sportlots orders. It was one of the last significant base cards I needed to cross off the Whaler list.

Ray Ferraro's Topps RC was the other one. I now have every Hartford Whalers base card (Topps and OPC) from 1982-83 to 1990-91. 

I'm seven cards away from completing 1990-91 Whalers in all mainstream sets (need one Score Canadian and six more Upper Deck French/Canadian.) Unfortunately I only have room for one Whalers card from 1979-80 to 1991-92, and my 1992-93 to 1994-95 Whalers binder is completely full. 

I do have room for 17 Whalers cards from 1995-96 to 1997-98, including Carolina cards where the player is still pictured in green and blue. My original plan was to try to accumulate every Whalers base card from 1979-80 to 1997-98; if I had the time and money to see that through I'd need another binder. 

Here's my Whalers wantlist on an Excel spreadsheet if anyone reading this is interested. (note: this includes cards I have in my collection as part of completed sets only.)

As for my favorite hockey team that still exists, I haven't made a detailed Devils wantlst but I'm pretty close to completing the first nine New Jersey seasons. 1982-83 through 1987-88 are complete, and I need just two O-Pee-Chee cards to complete 1988-89. 1990-91 is a bit tougher, I need 14 cards to finish the year - mostly Score Rookie/Traded and Upper Deck Canadian. 

These cards and others were purchased from Sportlots seller barriere, who issued me a partial refund. Not because anything was out of stock, which was my initial thought. He simply gave me 50% cash back perhaps he felt bad taking two dimes for overproduced Kevin Todd commons lol. That $2.67 refund covered the cost of the Kevin Dineen at the top of this post - which was $2.65 from davekas4. Sportlots is so addicting!!

Out of all my various card collecting project the one that I have the most available space for new additions is/are New Jersey Devils cards. My inserts/parallels/relics boxes for Red Sox, Packers, and Whalers are full -- but I have room for 12-15 more Devils hits.

I have room for 20 Packers base cards - mostly in the 2010s-2020s binders. 
I have room for 20 Whalers cards across all three binders.

Devils 1 (1982-83 to 1992-93) has room for 10 cards.
Devils 4 (2004-05 to 2013-14) has room for 6 cards.
Devils 5 (2014-15 to present) has room for 35 cards. Maybe more if I insert additional 9-pocket pages. 

You'd think that it would be easy for me to acquire cards of Jersey's team since I live in Jersey. But my LCS doesn't sell singles, Target rarely has hockey packs/boxes, and the card shows in town always seem to be on a weekend when Mrs. Collector's health is at her lowest. Probably for the best since I'm guessing those shows are 70% Pokemon and overpriced Yankees stuff anyway.

Very few card bloggers collect hockey and I don't have any connection to a Canadian trader who can get their hands on low-mid end Devils inserts and relics like I can with Red Sox cards. So it's all online ordering for me, which is a total drag. I used to fill my boxes with 30-cent ePack crap from COMC -- but they've completely jacked up the shipping charges, discarding their flat $5.99 rate (which was $4.99 not that long ago) in favor of a per-card charge. I'm probably never ordering from them again. 😢

Next week, I'll update my NFL inventory. I should have the rest of my Packers purchases in hand by then.

Thanks for reading!

 

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