Jacques Plante makes an appearance!

Will (you'll notice his picture below here with another nice pull) just stopped in and bought one pack of In The Game's 2012-13 Between The Pipes and hit this beauty: Jacques Plante Big League Debut Silver version! I tried to make a trade, but Will says it's a keeper -- and I agree! Stop in for your packs or boxes of BTP today, and check out ITG's website for more information, including the redemption offer at the upcoming Canadian Sportcard Expo!

Closed on Wednesday evening

Just a note -- we will be closing at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24th. The IceBox will re-open Thursday, April 25th, at 9:30 a.m. and resume normal hours. Thanks!

The Universal Retailer's Summit in Montreal!

We spent yesterday in Montreal at the Universal Retailers Summit, which was hosted by Universal Distribution.

Reps from UD and Panini were on hand, and here's what they had to say. Feel free to post questions here and I'll answer them (if I actually have an answer for you):

PANINI

Tentative release schedule for 2012-13 season:

August -- Score
October -- Classic Signatures (legends autographs 1 per pack $30 MSRP)
Late October -- Certified Hockey
November -- Limited and Titanium
December -- Crown Royale
January -- Donruss Elite
February -- Totally Certified (base on the old TC with HRX video cards)
April -- Contenders
May -- Rookie Anthology
early June -- Prime
late June -- Dominion

Other notes:

* All Prime Ties cards in Panini Prime (which have the entire lace-up from the front neck of the jersey) will be redemptions because of the thickness of the cards and fear of damage in the packaging. However, all cards will be produced and ready for immediate redemption.

* Gordie Howe will have autographs in Prime and GU memorabilia cards in Dominion. Panini acquired a Howe gamer from the 1950s.

* Dominion will now feature an autographed patch rookie card /199 in EVERY PACK. The card will be a vertical format, and there will also be a horizontal variation /99.

* Dominion has been changed to have more different designs and fewer parallels. Base cards will also come on thicker, 120 pt stock, and there will be less variation in the point stock of cards across the set.

* Score will have 49 holdover rookies from last season and features the return of the Check-It inserts from the mid 90s. There will also be more Recollection autographs.

UPPER DECK:

* UD felt there were too many boxes with no card representing the best rookies, so SP Authentic will feature some major changes. They include a 100-card Extended Rookie set seeded 12 per box and a rookie Holo FX set. They were no release date given.

* Ultimate, in the words of product guru Grant Sandground, will be "patchier" this year. They are trying to replace standard jersey with more patch cuts and variations.

* There was absolutely no mention of The Cup, other than to say there was another product not being mentioned and we knew what it was. However, my impression was that the product is in production and awaiting return on autographs, etc.

* O-Pee-Chee Hockey will release in August and has some relatively major changes, including the dropping of the Souvenirs GU cards and the addition of Team Logo Patches. This set will be similar to the Animal Patches in Goodwin and be seeded 3-4 per case with some incredibly tough pulls. OPC will also feature a hobby-only 600-card red border variation set available through wrapper redemptions. There will also be cards available through these packs not available anywhere else.

* Artifacts has been expanded to include a larger base set, allowing for more players who might not have low print run patches and autos to be included. Stars and Legends /999 cards will be changed this year to a 25-card goalie set and a 25-card Team Canada set. Also, EVERY BOX will have either a patch, fight strap, stick or tag in it.

* Series I will again feature the Canvas subset and also hand-signed Gretzky AU /79. There will also be six six-card PETG sets /100 called Pride Of ... featuring different countries. There will also be the return of Silver Skates (including SPs and gold and gold SPs) and a 60-card Radiance set inserted 1:432.

We were given SPA Extended Rookie Promotion 4-card preview packs. Given that it's a 100-card set and there were no more than 100 people in the room, these have got to be pretty limited. The full checklist is on the Upper Deck Blog, and I'll post scans of what I got below.

 

What's William smiling about? Well, before we reveal the close-up, we'll give you a chance to guess to what Upper Deck card he's holding!

Send your guess to hittheicebox@gmail.com and we'll draw a winner from all correct entries to receive an autographed 8x10 of Hockey Hall of Famer Johnny Bower! Entries must be received by 12:01 AM EST on Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, to be eligible.

New products in at The IceBox!

New in at The IceBox Cards & Collectibles -- 2011-12 Score Hockey! Stop by and pick up a 36-pack box today for just $39.99, or packs are just $1.49!

Also now in stock -- 2011-12 Panini NHL stickers and albums! We have the albums for $2 each, sticker packs for $1 each or 50 sticker pack boxes for $42.99! Collect them all!

Panini announces its plans for the 2011 Fall Expo!

Panini made a big splash last year in their first foray to the Canadian Sportcard Expo, and they're back again this year! Check out the great stuff they'll be bringing on the Panini America blog and stay tuned both there and here for more information!

Just a reminder -- as always, we'll be in booths 1211-1214 at the Expo with Set Killer's Corner, our amazing array of patch cards, the Robert Thomas Collection of autographed cards and 8x10s and much, much more!

See you there!

The 2011-12 Upper Deck Young Guns are coming!

Michael Phillips of Upper Deck was kind enough to send along the information for this year's crop of Young Guns! Here's the list, and check out Upper Deck's blog for more information and pictures!

We'll be getting in our Series I boxes right before the Fall Expo and we are accepting preorders for boxes and cases! Stop by or email us today to reserve yours!

201	Devante Smith-Pelly	Anaheim
202	Maxime Macenauer	Anaheim
203	Greg Nemisz	Calgary
204	Roman Horak	Calgary
205	Justin Faulk	Carolina
206	Marcus Kruger	Chicago
207	Brandon Saad	Chicago
208	Gabriel Landeskog	Colorado
209	Cameron Gaunce	Colorado
210	John Moore	Columbus
211	David Savard	Columbus
212	Cam Atkinson	Columbus
213	Tomas Vincour	Dallas
214	Ryan Nugent-Hopkins	Edmonton
215	Anton Lander	Edmonton
216	Teemu Hartikainen	Edmonton
217	Erik Gudbranson	Florida
218	Brett Bulmer	Minnesota
219	Aaron Palushaj	Montreal
220	Alexei Yemelin	Montreal
221	Raphael Diaz	Montreal
222	Brendon Nash	Montreal
223	Jonathon Blum	Nashville
224	Blake Geoffrion	Nashville
225	Craig Smith	Nashville
226	Adam Henrique	New Jersey
227	Adam Larsson	New Jersey
228	Tim Erixon	New York
229	Mika Zibanejad	Ottawa
230	Colin Greening	Ottawa
231	Patrick Wiercioch	Ottawa
232	Erik Condra	Ottawa
233	Stephane Da Costa	Ottawa
234	Sean Couturier	Philadelphia
235	Matt Read	Philadelphia
236	Erik Gustafsson	Philadelphia
237	Joe Vitale	Pittsburgh
238	Harri Sateri	San Jose
239	Alex Stalock	San Jose
240	Brett Connolly	Tampa Bay
241	Jake Gardiner	Toronto
242	Joe Colborne	Toronto
243	Matt Frattin	Toronto
244	Ben Scrivens	Toronto
245	Cody Hodgson	Vancouver
246	Yann Sauve	Vancouver
247	Carl Klingberg	Winnipeg
248	Mark Scheifele	Winnipeg
249	Paul Postma	Winnipeg
250	Checklist (Nugent-Hopkins, Landeskog, Larsson)	Edmonton, Colorado, New Jersey

Big Shea Weber pull at The IceBox!

Troy and Jasmine landed the 11-12 Artifacts Shea Weber patch/tag autograph 1/1 last night! Congrats to them!

 

We'll be open tomorrow!

If you were wondering, our new store will be open for business Thursday, July 28, at 11:30 a.m.! Come by and check out the new digs, but cut us a little slack -- we're still putting up slat wall and moving things around!

The new store hours are:

MON-THURS 11:30-7:30
FRIDAY 11-8
SATURDAY 10-6:30
SUNDAY 12-5

See you soon at 7975 Yonge Street in Stroud (Innisfil if you're looking to GPS it), in the plaza between the Rexall and TD Canada Trust!

2010-11 Upper Deck Ultimate checklist and odds!

Courtesy of our hard-working friend VodkaLodka on the Hobby Insider boards, check out his spreadsheet with the checklist and pull odds for Upper Deck's 2010-11 Ultimate Hockey:

VodkaLodka's 10-11 Ultimate checklist and odds

Many thanks to him, and drop by the store for yours today!

New at The IceBox!

Upper Deck Ultimate lands at The IceBox on Wednesday, with its standard awesome content of one autograph, one memorabilia and one rookie per pack, plus a numbered base card.

We'll have a case on hand by the afternoon, so stop in and grab yours!

Customers Stu and Jeff went splits on a box of 2010-11 Upper Deck Series II and here's the big hit:
















That's a P.K. Subban Victory rookie magenta printing plate 1/1! Wow! Congrats, guys!

Just a reminder -- Johnny Bower is in the store from 1:30-3:30 p.m. tomorrow. Autographs are $15 with $5 going to our local chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters!

For more info, check out our website!

Holy cats!

Has it been this long since we posted something here on the blog? We apologize -- you can come to the store to yell at us for it. ;)

Just got back from the Vegas Industry Summit and thought I would share this link to an interview with Chris Carlin of Upper Deck from Sports Card Forum. Chris is a good guy and cares about collectors, no matter what you might think of his employers.

Give it a read and stay tuned for more posts, box breaks, hit and opinions!

All the Hamilton news that's fit to print!

I was Googling us the other day (don't give me that look -- you do it too) and came across a mention of a card pulled in our shop a few months ago.

Turns out The Hamiltonian is your source for all things Josh Hamilton -- even word about his impending surgery for what may be a sports hernia after crashing into a wall in the process of making a great catch. Hopefully his recovery will be speedy and the Rangers will get him back right after the All-Star Break.

Hamilton's a great story -- you can read his own words here in an ESPN The Magazine piece -- and if you get some neat Josh Hamilton cards or stuff, I think you know who to talk to now!

Check out our web site at Hit The IceBox!

Mark and John hit it big!

Mark and John stopped by before the spelling bee being held in the Kozlov Centre on Saturday and picked up a few packs of 08-09 UD MVP Hockey.

They were glad they did, pulling the 2-On-2 quadruple-swatch game-used jersey of Sidney Crosby, Dany Heatley, Rick Nash and Jason Spezza. Congrats, guys!

Oh, MAN!

All I can say about this auction item is ... drool.

Bringing Henderson's goal home to the HHOF

Pat Stapleton recently finally admitted he has the puck from Paul Henderson's famous 1972 Summit Series goal. Of course, people are now going nuts about what Stapleton should do with it -- donate it to the Hockey Hall of Fame, selling it at auction, keep it.

I made a similar suggestion to the following for the Barry Bonds home run ball, and I'll suggest it now for Labatt's, Research In Motion or some similar Canadian company:

1) Determine a fair market price for the puck.
2) Labatt's writes a cheque in that amount to Pat Stapleton. They also write another cheque for the same amount in the name of every single player on the '72 team and give it to Stapleton's favourite charity.
3) Labatt's, Stapleton and whichever team members want to attend then hold a press conference and donate the puck to the HHOF.

Whatever Labatt's (or whomever) pays for the puck, the company will get 10 times the amount of positive publicity for the gesture, the puck ends up in the Hall of Fame where it belongs and everyone goes home happy.

Oh, and I'll promote the card show/autograph signing surrounding the '72 players being in town. :D

The Scourge of Pack Searching

Adam McFarland over at The Sports Lizard has an interesting article on pack searching where he used calipers to find the thick packs in a football box.

Adam actually picked a product that is a little weird in this respect, as Donruss tends to seed its autographs in packs that don't have a memorabilia card. Other possibilities for search were raised by readers, including weighing the packs.

And it's not even that tough. There are any number of products that come out every year that can easily be searched. 2007-08 Upper Deck SPx, for example, generally contains four jersey cards per 18-pack box. It's very easy to feel which packs have the jerseys in them because UD doesn't put decoys in the other packs.

There are tons of other examples, and they are the reason we don't allow customers to pick their own packs.

The more insidious problem, however, is store owners searching the boxes. I pledge to you that we don't, and here's why -- we have a reputation to maintain. We have a large enough number of regular customers that even if we decided to go the dishonest route, they would quickly ascertain that we were searching our boxes and stop frequenting us.

We also regularly tell our customers to be careful purchasing from retail outlets because no one at Wal-Mart is watching for searchers. Of course, there's already so few good cards in most retail products, it's tough to pull anything great even if you aren't cheating.

As for eBay, caveat emptor is the best policy. It's possible the best boxes have been pulled from cases, or boxes have been opened and resealed -- and I would never purchase a single pack on line, period.

If you have concerns, ask us, whether you're buying from us or anyone else. We're here to help. But as for us and pack searching -- never have, and never will.

There are also a couple of other blogs linked in Adam's article -- be sure to jump over and read those also.

Welcome to our newest collector!

Big Mike Jenkins, one of our best customers and a big baseball guy, has a new addition to his family -- 8 lb, 2 oz Chelsea! Congratulations, Mike!

The IceBox II -- The Empire Strikes Back!

Okay, so it isn't that big a deal, but we're in our new digs! The store is more than 2,000 square feet, with a big pack wall (and only getting bigger), plenty of singles, NHL RBK replica jerseys, gameworn items, replica masks, autographs, framed pieces, custom framing ... well, you get the idea!

In addition, we now have The Brick Collectible Comfort Zone ready for your viewing and relaxing pleasure! Thanks to the fine folks at The Brick, we now have:

* A 52-inch Samsung plasma screen HD TV
* An 11-foot leather sectional couch with a pair of recliners
* A full wireless surround-sound system and DVD/iPod/CD/XM receiver
* A nice foldout coffee table for breaking boxes!

Stop by and check us out, and we'll post pictures soon!

Say hello to Mario in Sweet Shot!

We just picked up a few more tins of 2007-08 Upper Deck Sweet Shot Hockey, and Clarence stopped by to pick up a card and decided to try his luck with a tin with oddball numbering in relation to the others on the shelf.

As his reward, he nailed the Sweet Show Stick Signatures Mario Lemieux autographed stick card numbered 12/15. Nice pull, Clarence!

A kind word to the folks at Inkworks!

Just a shout out to the folks at Inkworks, makers of fine non-sport cards such as Family Guy and The Simpsons, among others. I was fortunate enough to meet Inkworks owner Allan Caplan at a distributor's day a few years back, and he is a super-nice guy.

One of our customers, Chris, picked up a box of Scooby Doo 2 and cracked it with his kids. They were fortunate enough to pull the redemption for an autographed Alicia Silverstone card.

Unfortunately, the redemption expired September 30, 2004!

Both I and another of my customers advised Chris to send in the redemption anyway, just to see if there was any chance of getting the autograph. Lo and behold, in his mailbox this morning:



Thanks, Allan, and everyone else at Inkworks!

Kane do!

We've blown through more than a case of the new 2007-08 SP Authentic since Thursday! Congrats to Marty, who nailed the Patrick Kane FW authographed rookie card in the last pack of his box!

Of course, he also pulled the die-cut HoloFX Sidney Crosby in the first pack -- nice box!

We're out temporarily, but we will have boxes back in stock on Monday! Grab them before they go even higher!

A little insight into our autograph business

We've recently had a discussion over on the Spawn boards about bringing in players for autograph signings. Rather than rehash everything here, here's a link to that conversation.

If you have any questions, feel free to make a comment here or send me an email.

What's up with this year's SP Game Used?

Every year I'm a huge fan of Upper Deck's SP Game Used. Even two years ago when the player selection for the base jerseys was awful, I cracked boxes and wholeheartedly recommended it to my customers.

This year, the cards are fantastic. Dual jerseys as the base memorabilia cards, lots of interesting patch inserts and autographed cards -- UD really could have hit a home run here.

Instead, there are tons and tons of damaged cards coming out of packs. Take a look at the people breaking it on the Beckett Hockey forum -- complaints galore. I have pulled two patch cards and both of them have had huge chunks out of the sides.

When will this stop? It's annoying for me, because by the time I get these cards back from UD, the resale value will be half of what it is now. For customers, it's frustrating to pony up big $$$ for a box and then get cards that look as if Richard McWilliams has been tap dancing on them.

I also don't know if this is substantiated or not, but I've heard the reason SPGU was delayed was so Upper Deck could work on quality control in these cards. I hope that's not true.

I trust Upper Deck to make good on these cards -- they generally do. I also understand damage will happen (despite the fact I mailed out an entire box of damaged cards last year for a customer and never received anything back from Upper Deck). But there's no excuse for the frequency with which these cards are coming out trashed.

This product will still sell and sell well. Heck, I'm still going to crack another box. But come on, UD -- pick it up a little. This is embarrassing.

A golden oldie from this year's O-Pee-Chee!

People have been raving about this year's O-Pee-Chee, and I don't blame them. A nice low price point, tons of RCs and a shot at pulling out a quad jersey or something even cooler.

Customer Stewie's definitely raving after nailing this beauty out of a box purchased from The IceBox on Christmas Eve:



That's right -- a 74-year-old card! When the redemption comes in, we'll put up a scan for you! Congrats to Stewie!

A customer goes Bolland in UD Ultimate!

Okay, it was a lousy pun, but Adam's not laughing. He's now pulled these two beauts from packs of 2006-07 Upper Deck Ultimate:



We're still carrying Ultimate at $369.99 per box or $94.99 per pack. Stop by and try your luck!

Crosby Ice RC /99 BGS 9.5 on eBay!

Just for fun, you might to keep your eyes on this beauty. I think it could hit $4K easily, and I wouldn't be surprised to see someone hit the BIN.

We had two of these bad boys last year -- man, do I miss them!

Thanks for the head's up, Big Bob!

Gretzkymania runnin' wild!

Chris stopped by this afternoon and busting a pack of our newly cheaper 2006-07 UD Ultimate at just $99.99 a pack, and pulled a Wayne Gretzky autographed jersey out of 50!

Not to be outdone, Adam dropped in just a few minutes later, bought a box of Ultimate (for just $369.99!) and pulled a Gretzky Ultimate Signatures autographed card!

That's right -- two Gretzky autos in five minutes! Top that!

Here are their smiling mugs, and the sweeeeeet cards!