Modern cards I actually like

I remember Clancy in his 80s. Seeing him as a young man in (artificial) colour is cool.

I tend to post a lot of (or perhaps nothing but) vintage and the reasonable inference would be that I either don’t like or don’t collect anything modern.  To an extent, this is true – but only to an extent.

I find that I don’t get all that thrilled about the gimmicks in today’s cards.  I’ve had some patch cards, autos and jerseys and they’re OK (although “event-used” is a crock), but I hate that they’ve largely come at the expense of the base set.  The fact that “base” is a bad word amongst many collectors exemplifies most of what irks me about the hobby.  It used to be that the set itself was the key and inserts were at best a plus and at worst an annoyance.  Now, people collect the inserts and ignore the set.  This is backwards.

In fairness, there are so many sets, subsets and variations that one quickly needs a warehouse to store things.  Even adding each year’s Upper Deck flagship set like I do means the collection grows by at least 1000 every other year.  That’s why I only get the one set.  I have a finite amount of space.

But if a set is small, focused on the cards themselves and kind of nifty, I’m all over that.

That’s why I like this so much.

Champs minis aren’t novel to anyone anymore (other than me), but this is right up my alley.  The set is small (both physically and in number), they’re kind of different, they have names I like (though I’d like this too with modern players – I thought the mini ’51 Parkhurst clones from ’02-03 were fantastic) and it’s not the same old same old.

I just don’t have a lot of them, so I don’t post them.

This is really an Ottawa card - putting "Toronto" is pandering to people like, well, me. It worked. I bought it.

I got this card the other day at a shop while looking for Panini stickers for my kids (and I’d like to congratulate Panini on a product which kids under 10 seem to go bonkers for).  My seven-year-old is a big Kessel fan, and while picking up a SPX Kessel from last year (which is also quite nice) I spotted this Clancy.  Purists will note that while the back says Toronto, the uniform he’s in and the logo on the back are both Ottawa.  No matter.  This is nifty.  I will be picking up more of these.

Prior to the Clancy, the only other mini I’d had was this one.  I love it, too.