by Rookie, All Habs

MONTREAL, QC — I have a confession to make: one of my favourite things about being a hockey fan is the merchandise. I’m not usually like that. I’m not one of those people who treats a shoe store like it’s church. I tend to not get interested in any particular topic or pastime just because of stuff. (Unless it’s free.)
Hockey merchandise is a different story. I love digging around malls, Shop.NHL.com, and CafePress just to see if there’s any merch I haven’t seen before. Sometimes I’ll just look at something in my own house and decide where on its surface I’d want to put a Habs logo. My co-blogger Czechtacular is the same, having come up with the idea for player name-and-number shirts long before they were produced post-lockout.

Oddly enough, one of my favourite places to look for NHL-related stuff is the dollar store. I know that might sound strange to some of you, but it’s surprising how often I see hockey-related things at the dollar store. In most constant supply are the packs of hockey cards, a steal at $1 for fifteen cards. Sure, a few of them aren’t worth more than the seven cents you paid them, but you never know what you’ll get. It’s usually a mixed bag of cards from different collections, brands, and time periods. Great for a laugh but also quite educational for new fans like me. (It’s good to know, for example, that Rick Tocchet was horrifyingly ugly even before his coaching days.)

I wouldn’t really refer to all my packs of hockey cards as a “collection”, although I was happy to give that label to my childhood card collection: a box of my big brother’s doubles and rejects. I’d probably have to organize and store the cards properly, and maybe buy them from places other than Dollarama. It wouldn’t hurt to choose my cards with some legitimate criteria.

Right now my main criterion is “He’s a Hab!”

A Mathieu Schneider card from his first incarnation as a Hab that I came across in a dollar-store pack shortly after he was traded here last season, and a Marc-Andre Bergeron card that I bought purposely a few days after he was traded here this year, a prime example of my “He’s a Hab!” buying policy.

Then, there’s my “I like him!” reasoning.

I see a card with an interesting design scheme, and Jarome Iginla is one of my favourite players outside Montreal. Done deal.

From time to time, like most packs of hockey cards, you get a nasty little surprise.

I was hoping that, at the very least, the bad news of owning a Mats Sundin rookie card would pay off when I found out how much it was worth. Turns out it’s worth two dollars. I guess that’s good news if I keep in mind that I paid seven cents for it.

Maybe I should turn this into a proper collection, but for now I’m enjoying the thrill of spending a dollar on hockey cards and hoping for some surprises… not to mention keeping busy looking for whatever Habs merchandise I just have to have.