LINDEN CARD OF THE WEEK - 2007/08 OPC Quad Materials Jersey

For this show & tell, I thought I grace you with the story of the best Trevor Linden card pull I have ever experienced.

The 2007/08 hockey card season was the continuation of the downward trend in Linden cards included in products. It was a sad time for my Linden collecting as I was coming to grips that the days of Trev being included in pretty much every card release was over. It was guys like the Sedins, Kesler, Luongo Morrison and Naslund who were taking the coveted Canucks spots in the sets.

In 2007/08, Trevor only had 25 total cards to chase - and half of those were from the Artifacts product alone. And while he had some great looking cards amongst this small group (especially the low numbered patch cards), there was one card that really caught my eye.

2007/08 O-Pee-Chee

Quad Materials Jerseys

#QM-LLMK (Linden/Luongo/Morrison/Kesler)

This card was included in the highly sought after OPC release. This was the season before the introduction of the retro design parallel, but still had some great looking cards. The 'Micromotion' parallel is to this day one of the nicest card sets to be released in the past 5 years.

I had already landed the Linden base, Micromotion and the Micromotion Black /100 and was on the hunt for the elusive quad jersey. A few had surfaced on ebay, but the asking price was way too high. That's the problem when you have other Linden collectors, Luongo collectors, Kesler collectors, general Canucks collectors and those who were just building the quad jersey set. A little competition can inflate prices quickly and often.

So I waited......and waited........and waited.

The prices were just not coming down. Eventually, the cards were just not popping up. People had moved on to the next product release. This was not looking good.

A trip to the card store on weekend saw me gawking at the various boxes (I had an urge to crack some wax) and eventually chose the 07/08 OPC. My brain was actually thinking 'Sure, I can pull the quad....it could happen'.

So, pack after pack I began to open. The base cards were not the greatest, but the inserts and parallels made up for that. Especially when I got down to the last few packs.

I had not a single jersey card to my name yet and I was hoping one of the last packs would yield something nice. There were about 3 or 4 packs left when I peeled open the wrapper and could tell there was a thicker card in place of the decoy. Excited, I went straight to the money card.

Wouldn't you know it. I saw the Linden first and let out a big 'woo-hoo'. Not only was it the Linden quad I had been hoping for, but two of the four jersey pieces were 2-color (sadly, not the Linden who ended up with the boring white). But still, it was the nicest copy of the quad jersey card I had seen.

The shop owner knew I was a Linden collector and was thrilled for me. He still mentions that pack pull to this day. While the odds weren't 'out of this world to pull this card, I still think there were some pretty long odds to land it.

Definitely the best Trevor Linden card I have ever pulled from a pack.