2005-06 NHL Replay Cards

One of the Zellers locations in my area are on the verge of shutting their doors for good and so forth are having a clearence sale; me and my fiance were driving around the city doing some thrifting a few days ago and decided to drop in and pay a visit, maybe they would have something on sale that would fixate our interests.

As per any usual Zellers visit, I made a bee-line to the card section only to find that it was pretty much picked apart down to the bare bones; UFC, the Simpsons and Magic - a few boxes of Puck Attax remained unscaved but that was about it when it came to hockey.

But just when I was about to give up hope in uncovering at least one pack of something or another; underneath the shiny unicorn figurines and puppy dog keychains, I dug this up...

I've never seen or even heard of these NHL Replay Cards before, just great!  I love finding random oddball hockey shit.  At a loonie I wasn't exactly going to go broke, how could I go wrong - the sheer pleasure of opening up and finding out just what exactly these cards were all about was worth it in my opinion.

I did a little research on these cards and it appears they were produced by Quebec-based Softmotion, a designer and printer of 3-D lenticular images.  There are 36 cards in Series 1 which are licensed by the NHL and NHLPA.  Softmotion were able to weave their way around Upper Decks exclusive rights in the hockey card industry during the era due to the unstandard size (3x4) of the cards they released.

Markus Naslund of the Vancouver Canucks on the breakaway; not a bad player to haul.  The card has two photos featured on the front depending on which way you tilt it.  You can slightly see the other photo in the above scan; but for a much clearer view, it's the first picture on the left side of the wrapper.  Not sure if the photos featured on the front of the wrapper indicate the card inside or if it was just a coincidence.

Not much to write home about in regards to the back of the card.  The write-up is game dated in accordance to the picture on the front of the card, 2004 - didn't collect during that period, but geez way to make me feel old.  Anyway card is numbered 31 out of 36.

Blueprints were in the works for a secnd series but never did get off the ground.