Signature Sundays - "Just When I Thought I Was Out...They Pull Me Back In!"

If you check in here even occasionally, it should be no secret to you that the Panini Classics Signatures autographs were my absolute favorite hockey cards released during the 2012-13 collecting season.  They were really my number one overall collecting focus last year, and I've been showing off the autographs nearly every Sunday for what feels like forever now.

Last week I showed three more Hall-of-Famers, which left me with just four cards to go for the non-short-printed autograph set.  I could see the end in the finish line, just a couple more posts to go.  Then, this past week, a funny thing happened.  One of my saved eBay searches for the Classics Signatures set turned up a card I was sure wasn't on the autograph checklist:

Valeri Bure?  Could I have had a bad checklist and overlooked this card for nearly two years?  It didn't take me long to find out what had happened...Panini went ahead and released a bunch of (previously unreleased) autographs from the 2012-13 Panini Classics Signatures set within their 2013-14 Contenders product!  Some might see this as a cheap ploy, but I don't care, I'm just excited that I've got more (on card!) autographs to chase.  When I finally found the checklist I discovered that there are 23 of these included in the Contenders release.  One of them, Anders Hedberg, was on the original Classics Signatures autograph checklist, which means 22 new autographs for me to chase.

I won't grab them all, especially since some appear to be short printed.  I watched the only copy of Glenn Anderson's card I've seen hit eBay climb north of $80 if you can believe that.  Valeri here was had for the opening bid of 99 cents, which is more in my ballpark.

I guess the best Panini could come up with for Valeri's write-up was to mention his "stout legs" and some celebrity figure skating contest.  I would have gone with the obvious Candace Cameron/Full House reference.

Here's one more from the Contenders checklist to kick things off, Stu Barnes.  Originally a #4 overall pick (Winnipeg Jets), Stu would end up playing with Florida, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Dallas before hanging up his skates.

Very clever Panini, very clever.  Thanks to 2013-14 Contenders you can definitely expect to see some more of these autographs on future Sundays...