Signature Sundays - Jari Kurri and Mark Howe!

I've really been slacking with my weekly Signature Sundays posts, where I feature a card (or a few) from my growing autograph collection.  This week I'm bringing it back (by request believe it or not!), and of course I'm making the return in the form of the 2012-13 Panini Classics Signatures set.

Today we've got two Hall-of-Famers.  First up is one of my favorite players on the checklist and an autograph I've wanted to obtain for a long time, Jari Kurri!

Jari doesn't have the most spectacular signature of the players in this set, but he does have one of the best careers.  600 career goals, just shy of 1,400 career points, 5 Stanley Cup Championships.  I know there's the "Gretzky factor" but Kurri and the boys won a Cup without Wayne, which is something Wayne himself never managed after his days in Edmonton.  Kurri's card is short-printed in this set, so there aren't a ton of these floating around out there either.

I'm particularly fond of this one as the picture gives you a good look at Jari's famed JOFA helmet, and he's also wearing basically the same uniform as he is on probably my all-time favorite Kurri card:

As my first SP, Kurri is a significant addition to my set.  I'm under no delusion that I'll ever complete the entire autograph set, given that there are quite a few SPs and SSPs I've never seen even once in over two years of watching.  Not only that, but I've seen nearly every SSP card listed on eBay sell for well beyond $100, which is generally out of my budget.  The product's been out long enough now that folks have moved onto other things though, so every once in a while an auction for one of these rarer cards falls through the cracks so to speak.  When it does I'm happy to pounce on it, as I did with this one.

The other card I'm showing today is a case of the same thing, as I got this fantastic Mark Howe autograph for what I'd consider a steal.  Mark is one of the premier two-way defensemen in the history of the game, and like Kurri, is enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.  He played for my beloved Whalers in both the WHA and the NHL, though the majority of his NHL career was spent with the team he's depicted with here, the Philadelphia Flyers.

Mark's autograph card is also an SP in the set.  For well over a year after the set's release I never saw a single one of these cards pop up anywhere.  This past summer a few cropped up at long last, and I seem to have gotten the best deal yet as far as eBay's concerned.

I couldn't believe it when I took this one home with a winning bid of just over $22 back in June:

Given that I hadn't seen one yet, and knowing what I had seen other SPs go for, I figured this card would quickly climb past what I was willing to pay and easily end up somewhere north of $50.  I felt like I got a steal, and the next one I watched after it seemed to validate that:

You can click for a larger image, but this next auction for the same exact card attracted 14 bids and finished north of $70!!!  A couple more have popped up since and while they haven't quite gone for this much, they've still been more in the $35 - $40 range, nearly twice what I paid for mine.

That's all for today.  Glad to finally be able to feature a couple of SPs after so many Sundays of showing my cards from this set.