Cheap Thrills

While that is, in fact, the name of a classic album put out by Big Brother & the Holding Company way back in 1968, it is also how one might describe my card collecting habits.

I'm cheap - always have been, always will be.  I've come to grips with this fact long ago.

This quality translates to my hobbies as well.  I don't like dropping big bucks on mega-mojo hits or autographs.  I don't crack cases of cards or even as much as look at high-end money grabs like Triple Threads and the like.  *That said, if they end up in my lap, I sure won't complain.

All that said, one of my favorite places to kill time is the local dollar store.  It provides, drum roll please, Cheap Thrills:

I don't generally have much luck finding cards that I actually collect when it comes to repacks.  However, I had never seen a Collect-A-Book in a repack before and that was enough to pique my interest.

Maybe this one would be different?

Mr. Mitchell is a little worn, but the price was right.  This is the first "card" of it's kind to make it's way into my hands and as such, I never knew that they had these nifty little cartoons on the back. Perhaps I need to find me a Cubs one.

The only other literal baseball card of any interest (you might have noticed, I grabbed the "multi-sport" assortment) to fall out was this superb Ted Williams brand minor-league card of the legendary Cub-killer known as Mike Schmidt.

I love minor-league cards, I love Ted Williams cards, but I can't say I have much love for Schmidt... respect, yes; but, not love.  Still pretty cool to find it in a unassuming, dollar store repack though.

As for the other sports:

These were the only gridiron cards to be found, which was a little disappointing because I was hoping to add a little growth to my Bears All-Time Roster collection.  As it stands, neither of these guys suited up in blue and orange either.  So it goes.

But, if one picked up this repack wanting basketball cards...

...then you got your money's worth.  Too bad I don't really collect hardwood cardboard.

Still, as a Chicagoan and child of the 90's, I'll always have an affinity for the Bulls and I keep their cards when they wander into my collection.  Thus, B.J> and future-Bull John Salley were keepers for me.

Of other interest:

Again, as a child of the 90's, one of my favorite flicks growing up was Space Jam.  While I may not care too much about basketball as a whole, seeing names like these bring back the warm fuzzies.

Danny Ainge may have been a two-sport star, but I'll always think of him as the guy who yelled at Charles Barkley to "get back on D, man!" on the silver screen.

And now we get to the real reason I selected this particular re-pack:

Yes, hockey cards.  You read that right, I have now started up a hockey collection, focusing on completing the all-time roster for the Blackhawks - as if the Cubs and the Bears weren't enough of a possible task.  

Being that hockey is my second favorite sport to watch, it felt wrong to not have a card collection to go along.  I am a collector, after all.

Hockey collectors:  please feel free to swap me any Chicago dupes you might have. 

Of the hockey assortment, I was able to pull two for my Blackhawks chase.

Marty Turco had a long, productive career between the pipes for the Stars and when Antti Niemi was lost to free-agency, the Hawks signed him instead.  Unfortunately, he was quite washed up.  Not so unfortunately, his failing in Chicago allowed perennial all-star Corey Crawford to emerge from the shadows.

Meanwhile, Mr. Muni here was a bit of a hockey nomad, playing for six teams in his NHL career.  Most important to me though, was that he skated in a total of 18 contests for Chicago from 1992-94.

These two make it into my slowly growing accumulation.  A couple of dimebox digs provided a nice base from which to build this new collection - I'll have to spotlight it at some point here.

That brought an end to my my multi-sport repack; however, but I felt that another sport deserved some love too:

Yea, I bought a deck of Kyle Busch playing cards too.  The newly-crowned NASCAR champion was under-represented in my NASCAR collection; so, for a buck, why not?  And check out that hologram; they're officially official!

Each card featured this lovely portrait on the back:

Meanwhile, the face cards and aces all featured one of four poses, in lieu of the usual royalty:

Fitting, since Kyle is now NASCAR royalty, after all.  Since I have my fair share of playing cards, should I ever partake in a game of poker (more likely, go-fish), these will be broken up and treated as oddball trading cards.  I'm not sorry about it.

Sidenote - I remember when the younger Busch brother forced NASCAR to impose an age-minimum when he made his debut in the Truck series at the age of 16, leading to a temporary exile, way back in 2001.  To see him as the series champion now makes me feel old.

Time flies, man.

Flying around a super-speedway at 200mph will age ya!

Image courtesy of Snakkle

Anyway, everything you see here in the post cost me a whopping two dollars.  

To recap, I was able to add a couple of neat baseball oddballs, two Bulls, two Blackhawks and a NASCAR oddball set for a total of two George Washington flashcards... that's enough to make any penny-pinching collector smile.

Cheap Thrills indeed.