A couple of months ago, I was inspired by Nick (of the Dime Boxes) and Night Owl to post a list of what I considered the best and worst sets of the junk wax era for baseball. I was a young collector back in the junk wax days, and certainly opened my share of baseball packs during that time. But there was also another sport I collected:
Hockey.
So I thought I'd create a similar best and worst list for the coolest sport on ice.
Interestingly, the junk wax era for hockey cards didn't follow quite the same timeline. In the second half of the 1980s, when baseball junk wax was booming, you still only had two choices for hockey cards: Topps and O-Pee-Chee. But that all changed during the 1990-91 season, as FIVE new brands emerged on the scene (Pro Set, Score, Bowman, OPC Premier, and Upper Deck). It was a wild time to be a collector, that's for sure.
For the sake of this post, I think I'll set the junk wax hockey years as 1990-91 through 1994-95. After that, a whole bunch of premium brands came around, with all sorts of inserts and parallels and rare cards. I'd say that effectively ended the era.
So let's start with my selections for the five worst junk wax sets, in no particular order.
1991-92 Pro Set
The 1991-92 Pro Set design was never going to be as rambunctious as the inaugural version the year before (we'll get to that one later). However, I think the company might have gone too far in the opposite direction this time, and fallen flat. The loud colors and stripes of the 1990-91 set were replaced with. . . almost nothing. Just a full-bleed image and a little black tab across the bottom for the player name (not even a position!). Even some of the subsets in this set were boring. You could only tell one from another by a little half-circle banner over the team logo that indicated what subset card you were looking at. In addition, the photography was not great at times, with images that were a bit blurry, or that were strangely cropped. The black tab can kind of get in the way of the action on the card, too, as evidenced by Dale Hunter on the face-off and Chris Winnes taking a slap shot up there. Maybe the design team at Pro Set was still exhausted from the previous year.
1991-92 Score
Yeesh. Score was really trying to cash in on excitable collectors during the 1991-92 season. They produced three variations of the same set, each with a different color for the borders. Card backs were written in English, in French, or both. The adolescent version of me sure did get swept up in it, buying plenty of packs of the American (purple border) and Canadian English (red or light blue border with purple interior) versions. I might have bought packs of the Canadian Bilingual version too (red or light blue border with green interior), but I don't remember seeing packs in card shops or at card shows very often in my region of the US. It's true that there were a few exciting insert cards available in each set that featured Bobby Orr—including an autographed version. And occasionally a player's photo did differ from one version of the set to the next. But that certainly doesn't rescue 1991-92 Score from my bottom 5.
1993-94 Topps Premier
Back in 1990-91, O-Pee-Chee released their first premium set, called "Premier". It went over pretty well with collectors, and for the next two seasons, O-Pee-Chee continued with the brand. Then in 1993-94, Topps decided to jump in with "Topps Premier". It was the same exact set as the O-Pee-Chee version, other than the lack of French text on the card backs. I think I'd learned my lesson from Score a couple of years prior, and didn't fall for the Topps Premier hoopla—even with the allure of the special Black Gold inserts, which were admittedly pretty cool. 1993-94 Topps Premier was also one of the early hockey sets that suffered from "bricking" due to the ultra-varnish coating, which was another strike against it. Adding to the negatives, it was a time in the hobby when close-cropped player photos were in style, across many sets. Too close. I mean, look at how cramped those three guys are.
1993-94 Fleer Power Play
The irregular size and shape of these cards was eye catching, that's for sure. But I also think that a lot of folks bought one or two packs for the novelty of it, and then just never bought more. If that wasn't enough of a deterrent for collectors, the large set size (520 cards) probably did the trick. Even though it turned out that the cards measured the same as the vintage "tall boy", I didn't know many collectors who were willing to buy all the unique storage supplies necessary to complete and display the set, or even finish a team set. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Power Play did not return the next season. The thing is, Fleer didn't do such a bad job with the photography, oftentimes setting part of the player outside of the frame for that 3D effect. This works well on the taller template—especially in the digital image. As for how they looked on the actual cards in hand? I'm not so sure. Maybe the images would have worked better in some other form. Just imagine those three cards above as banners hanging throughout the concourse of an NHL arena, for example.
1994-95 Upper Deck Be a Player
I think 1994-95
Upper Deck Be a Player can be argued as a best set AND a worst set.
It's a potential worst set because of the photography. It's a potential best set because it was the first one outrageous enough to put an autographed card into every
pack. The list of autographs was an
astounding 178 cards deep, and it contained many of the big names of the time: Brodeur, Selanne, Bourque,
Leetch, LaFontaine, Shanahan, Gretzky, Yzerman, Kariya, Yashin,
Lidstrom.
The big negative, though, is for that photography. There are players standing outside in the cold, wearing ski jackets. There are players on the golf course, wearing polo shirts and khaki shorts. There are players wearing NHLPA
jerseys instead of their team's jersey. (There was a lockout during part of the '94-95 NHL season.) Ultimately, even though this inaugural edition of Be A Player really changed the game with the one-autograph-per-pack thing, I still have to put it in the bottom 5.
Now let's get to the top 5, also in no particular order.
1991-92 Upper Deck
If the inaugural Upper Deck hockey release came out with a bang, their follow-up set in 1991-92 was even louder—and in a good way. The designers really upped their game. You've got some fantastic subsets like the Canada Cup and All-Rookie Team, plus much better quality on the hologram inserts. In addition, there are lots of great rookie cards to be found (Teemu Selanne, Nicklas Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg, John Leclair, Alexei Yashin, Alexei Kovalev, and Keith Tkachuk to name a few). This is probably the Upper Deck set I collected the most back then, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I still remember walking to the local card show with my friend on the first Friday of each month, going back to my house with packs and packs of 1991-92 Upper Deck, and playing NHL Hockey on Sega Genesis while we flipped through the cards.
1990-91 Pro Set
Despite the many errors in this set (and many stripes of many colors), I've got to put this set in my top 5. It's large and colorful—perfect for young collectors—and both Series I and Series II have some great rookies. On top of the standard subsets like All-Stars, Draft Picks, and Award Winners, you've also got some fun subsets like Head Coaches, Career Leaders, and even Referees! Oh, and collectors had the rare chance to pull a Stanley Cup hologram card. The photos in this set weren't always the best, but they also showed some decent action and weren't cropped so tightly or oddly as some other sets of the hockey junk wax era. That's nice.
1990-91 OPC Premier
I remember packs of 1990-91 OPC Premier being tough to find back then. But if you did find them, you had a good chance at putting the complete set together—it's only 132 cards deep. There are certainly some big-name rookies (Jagr, Modano, Fedorov, Roenick, Bondra, Mogilny, Nolan, Sundin), and a decent design that helps to make it memorable. The photography can sometimes be plain, and I'm not sure this set would have been in my top-5 back in the early 90s, but history has shown that it holds up, and the big rookie cards are still prized among collectors.
1990-91 Score
Score made a splash with their inaugural hockey set. Part of the buzz was generated from their exclusive rights to Eric Lindros. He appeared on the final card in the set, and if you purchased a factory set, you received 5 "bonus" Lindros cards that featured him in various photoshoot-style hockey poses. Here in 2024 it might be hard to
understand how big of a deal this was, but Lindros was the
hottest name in the sport back then, and hockey card companies all wanted a piece of the big power forward. Lindros aside, Score did very
well with their first design. There were hardly any errors, especially when compared with some of
the other brands. The "hockey rink" design—featuring a blue line, red line, and blue line across the borders—was pretty cool. In addition, there were some fun subsets like "Blaster", "Sniper",
"Magician", "Stopper", and "Speedster". Baby-faced Jaromir Jagr and Martin Brodeur rookie cards add to the good grade here.
1990-91 Upper Deck
Upper Deck took their baseball card success from 1989 and rolled it right into hockey for the next season. Their photography was unmatched, and gave hockey card collectors the best look they'd ever had into what the sport was all about. (Flip through the set and you'll see that Theo Fleury and John Tonelli up there represent just two of many fantastic, descriptive images.) The tamper-proof foil packs and anti-counterfeiting holograms on the card backs were cutting edge. The rookie cards were highly sought after. And on top of all that, the Young Guns series was created that very first year. It's still going strong to this day, which is truly impressive.
So that's my bottom-5 and top-5 hockey sets from the junk wax era. If any of you readers collected hockey cards back then, share some of your rankings in the comment section—or create your own blog post!
Thanks for reading, as always.
