MY COLLECTION - Finally Disposing Of This Piece Of Paper

Cleaning off my desk last night and I (once again) came across this faded, barely sticky Post-It note reminding me of some very valuable information about some of the cards in my Linden collection. I've had it on my desk for almost a decade.

I vowed at that moment that I would finally.....FINALLY dispose of this piece of paper.

I realized that I can just slap a pic of it on my blog and call it a day.

So here goes...

Ahhhhhhh.....that's the exhale of accomplishment. LOL

Seriously though, what is this? What do these colors and numbers mean?

Well, let's go back to the 2015/16 hockey card season. 

It was a time of change for one particular company. In The Game had been a staple of my Linden collecting for over 20 years. Many of my favourite cards were developed and manufactured by Dr. Brian Price and his team. My master checklist has been filled out considerably by his work. But the time had come for Dr. Price to call it a day with ITG. The brand was moved over to Leaf to continue using the ITG name, but there was no question that it was the end of an era.

Before he left though, the decision to part with many of the remaining stock of cards was made. And so, In The Game Vault was created. Cards that were in existence but not released were given a Vault stamp of a particular colour and thrust out into the collecting world.

Oh...and each card, due to these stamps, were deemed 1/1's.

Oh...and another oh...there was no checklist.

Good grief.

My initial thought was "Hard pass". I just could not get behind what resulted in inflated prices on "one-of-one" hockey cards. The secondary market was salivating in hopes people would jump at these "rare cards".

That's where this piece of paper comes into play. See, some of the cards had multiple copies. So what do you do to make each of them unique? Stamp it with a different colour. And thus began the struggles of trying to figure out what was actually out there.

I'm still finding new Vault cards on my searches. But I refuse to add anything to my master list until I have seen a physical copy of a card pop up online. To date, I've added 105 ITG Final Vault Trevor Linden cards to my master list. Each one given the "one-of-one" identifier. That's absurd.

And there are dozens more out there that have just never seen the light of day. I know it. Because it all goes back to the piece of paper.

See, if there were multiple copies of a card released, it would get stamped in a certain order...

• Red = at least 1 copy exists
• Blue = at least 2 copies exist (a red one and a blue one)
• Green = at least 3
• Silver = at least 4
• Gold = at least 5
• Black = at least 6
• Pink = at least 7
• Purple = at least 8
• Copper = at least 9
• Teal = at least 10

Sigh....it's ridiculous. And nearly impossible to track. Scans of these stamps often don't clearly show what colour the stamp is (because it's foil and scanners don't like shiny stuff). And asking a seller what colour the Vault stamp is can be challenging too (because they don't know or they don't care).

So yeah, this piece of paper is here...was here to remind me of the formula. Actually, it was more a reminder of the frustration of these Vault cards.

But now, the paper is gone...and for now so will my memories of the challenge that is ITG Vault.

That felt a little cathartic. :)