BEHIND THE MASKS - Two More Card Show Pickups

Went to the monthly card show yesterday.  Was hoping to land a few cards from this year's Artifacts.  After all, my guy has a bazillion cards in the product so there must be a few hidden in the cheap bins.  Right?

Ah.....no.

In fact, not a single table had any Artifacts.  Has the product dried up already?  Did nobody crack a single box?  Did I miss the bus in bidding on some decent priced Linden cards on ebay?

Note:  I always miss the bus.

There were a couple of noticeable absences and that probably had something to do with it too.  I hate to say that I kind of rely on the wax breakers to feed my Linden card cravings locally.  There's no way I can afford to both crack and chase.

I was batting the big .000 with cards....so what to do?

Dig.

I normally sift through boxes looking for shiny things, cheap things, abnormal things and every once in a while I get rewarded.  Problem with a smaller, local, monthly card show is that the same stuff tends to sits on tables and in boxes month after month.

The sifting goes quicker and quicker each time.

But with nothing better to do on a Saturday morning and a huge desire to buy something, I decided to go through stuff a little more thoroughly.  And it paid off.

Nothing massive....but I did knock a couple cards off the wantlist.

Masked Men 5 might go down as my favourite mask set in years.  The sketch option instead of photos (some blurry and low res) definitely give the set a consistent look.  And the funky, shiny, laser-like red background looks cool both in person and via scan.  Win-win.

I really like Jonathan Quick's retro mask.  A tribute to Rogie Vachon.  Goes great with the purple and gold vintage uniforms they tend to wear on occasion.

Marc-Andre is another solid find.  Both cards were in a box way at the end labelled $3 each or 4 for $10.  I could only find these two that interested me so I bartered him down to $5.  I'm a stingy guy like that.

When I saw the Fleury, I remembered my first reaction to seeing this mask.  You can see that it appears to be a hockey card on the side of the mask.  A Tom Barrasso card in fact.

In this photo, you can get a better sense of what the paintjob looks like.  I knew I had seen that card before.  But it wasn't a dead ringer for the card I had in mind.

Huh.  Interesting.

There's no doubt that the card on the mask is this Barrasso Greats Of The Game.  But you can see that the ITG logo has been replaced by a Penguins logo.  Ironic since ITG doesn't have an NHL license and therefore can't use logos.  You can also see that a few liberties were taken in the color scheme and background designs.

Here's a link to an article better explaining the paintjob.  You can even check out the comments section where I just had to ask "So...did ITG give this guy permission to use the card likeness?"

In The Game gets razzed all the time for bending the rules, using logos in masks, whatever it may be, but the card on Fleury's mask is a toss right back.  In fact, if I remember correctly, Dr. Price did comment saying that no  discussion about the use of the card ever happened.

Kind of gives me a sour feeling towards the mask.

So we have an ITG card with a sketch of an NHL goalie mask depicting a goalie mask card of another ITG product modified with NHL logos.

Card shows can be so much fun.