Happy Hobbyween!

[creasecollector]

Hey everyone!

So, in preparation for Halloween this year, I decided to do something I've always wanted to try... Giving out hockey cards (and candy, of course) on Halloween!

I have always had a bunch of base cards lying around that were just collecting dust, so I decided to make them useful and prepare little "packs" of cards to hand out to the kids who want them.

I feel like I was quite generous and included 10 cards per pack, with at least 1 goalie card to keep things even.

Here's a quick recap of what went down:



Making the most out of my base card boxes and old toploaders here ...



I was glad to include some of this years OPC Platinum, just to keep things interesting and recent for those kids who receive them. I wanted to try and keep a lot of players that they know in these packs, while still using as many cards as I could to make as many packs as I was able to.



The number of decks continue to rise... :)




RON MACLEAN!! I totally forgot I had this card. Wow. I feel like a kid is going to either love this or laugh at it. Still, it was one of those "must have" additions to one of these packs when I was creating them.




And would it really be a pack of cards without a Jhonas Enroth card (or two)?? I was able to successfully insert about 7-8 Enroth cards in these mystery packs. The scope of Enroth card collectors will get a little bigger after October 31st, haha!



All said and done: Here's what 84 packs of hockey cards look like. I have since team bagged all of these with 1 toploader in each so the recipient can protect their favourite card in the pack.

I feel like these little cards will make a lot of people happy on Halloween this year! :) This was so fun to do. I had a blast putting these together!

I wanted to showcase this little project this year because I think it's a really cool idea that a lot of us collectors can easily adopt, plus it might get a kid or two involved in the hobby & help free up some space in your base boxes for more PC goodies :)

So I would like to challenge some of my fellow collectors here to grab those old base cards and create a few mystery packs this Halloween!

(If you have a picture or two to share of your own mystery packs, then I'd love to see them).

[scottkoz20]

this. is. awesome.

[vbhat]

Very cool!

[jim bradt]

What a great idea. Candy and cards and hopefully getting some of the younger kids interested in card collecting.

[scottkoz20]

I need to find one of my old articles I wrote back in the day about using Cards to help educate (it's a different topic, but along the same lines as what @jim bradt mentioned)

[creasecollector]

What a great idea. Candy and cards and hopefully getting some of the younger kids interested in card collecting.

That's the end goal! Cards + Candy (the most Canadian Halloween, ever? haha)

I never received cards when I was younger, but if I did, I certainly wouldn't forget it. So I thought this would be a really neat thing to do. Plus, my town loves hockey. So I'm sure some of the kids will love getting a few hockey cards!

[Leafsman]

Great idea!

I have lots of base cards as well but there are very few children in my area to give them to. I would love to give some to the ones that do go around, because it might break the iPad/tablet zombie syndrome. Unfortunately, they aren't old enough (they range from newborn to 4 years old).

[Sharky94]

Awesome! I have been doing this for years. Glad some others are getting into it. It really is fun to put the packs together. The beauty of this is that any one of us can do it. Who doesn't have extra base cards and old team packs sitting around collecting dust? You can be as cheap or as generous as you want to be. Remember, you are giving them away, so don't feel bad about just giving away commons...

Being in the US, I mix in some old cards from other sports, but it's still mostly hockey because that is all I collect these days. I started adding inserts and auto'd cards in about my third year of doing it (I am a Caps season ticket holder, so I can get Caps autos pretty easily). Last year, I finally got to the point where every single pack I make up has either a Caps jersey card or auto'd card in it, so each kid will get a treat. I scour COMC all year long and grab jersey cards for $1, and then get base cards signed. So each pack gets one or the other. I spend more on it than most people probably would, but we don't have kids, so we can afford it.

I've been doing it so long, we are known as the "Card House" and people come from all around. We even have a couple parents who drive their kids back to our neighborhood after moving away, just so their kids can get cards! We typically only get about 30-40 kids, but the last time it was on a Saturday night, we had over 75, and I had to scramble around to make up some extra packs (I'll know next time!).

I think I like it more than the kids do....

[creasecollector]

Awesome! I have been doing this for years. Glad some others are getting into it. It really is fun to put the packs together. The beauty of this is that any one of us can do it. Who doesn't have extra base cards and old team packs sitting around collecting dust? You can be as cheap or as generous as you want to be. Remember, you are giving them away, so don't feel bad about just giving away commons...

Being in the US, I mix in some old cards from other sports, but it's still mostly hockey because that is all I collect these days. I started adding inserts and auto'd cards in about my third year of doing it (I am a Caps season ticket holder, so I can get Caps autos pretty easily). Last year, I finally got to the point where every single pack I make up has either a Caps jersey card or auto'd card in it, so each kid will get a treat. I scour COMC all year long and grab jersey cards for $1, and then get base cards signed. So each pack gets one or the other. I spend more on it than most people probably would, but we don't have kids, so we can afford it.

I've been doing it so long, we are known as the "Card House" and people come from all around. We even have a couple parents who drive their kids back to our neighborhood after moving away, just so their kids can get cards! We typically only get about 30-40 kids, but the last time it was on a Saturday night, we had over 75, and I had to scramble around to make up some extra packs (I'll know next time!).

I think I like it more than the kids do....

So cool. Thanks for sharing ! I don't think I'll have enough packs for every kid, so I'll need to space things out throughout the night and hopefully the kids getting cards actually want them.

And your packs will have a lot more hits than mine!

[sparty07]

I would do this, but we get 3-4 kids per year at our house. We are all on half acre lots with long driveways (large chunk of the neighborhood is elderly with no kids) so everyone with kids goes to the town we're surrounded by (hooray unincorporated).
@scottkoz20 back in the day I took a summer school "extra curricular" program that we used cards in our statistics studies. At the end of the year everyone put together a baseball team with 8 positional players a starting pitcher and a closer from their selection of baseball players. Then stats were compared like fantasy to see who won in a march madness style contest. I won the student championship, big thanks to a willie mays reprint I had just gotten, but lost badly to our teacher who had original babe ruth, mantle, berra, etc. cards that he brought in to show us his collection and kick my butt.

He was also able to get a box full of some sort of football packs that we got each thursday through the whole summer. This was when Marshall Faulk was one of the big name cards to get.

I need to find one of my old articles I wrote back in the day about using Cards to help educate (it's a different topic, but along the same lines as what @jim bradt mentioned)