In a single hockey season, Upper Deck sold a dozen or more different card sets, from boxes that cost a few dollars a pack to boxes of eighteen cards and six hits. They were built for different collectors, and knowing the range makes it easier to know what a box is for. This is the ladder, from the bottom up, with the boxes we carry.
Built for volume
Collector's Choice was the bottom of the range: 36 packs of 6 cards, a Choice Rookie in every second pack and a parallel in every one. The CupQuest insert is laid out as a playoff bracket, rarer with every round. The 2009/10 edition added manga-style illustrations and team tattoos.
MVP was the other entry-level brand, deliberately cheap, with the same rookie classes as the expensive sets.
The set builders
O-Pee-Chee is the set for people who finish sets: 600-card base sets and a retro variation in every pack. In 2008/09 those retros reproduced the actual 1979-80 design — the pale blue borders of Wayne Gretzky's rookie card. Fleer Ultra carries the name of Fleer, a competitor that went bankrupt in 2005; Upper Deck bought the brands and brought them back.
The flagship
Series 1 and Series 2 are where the Young Guns rookie cards live, the most chased subset in hockey every year since 1990. The 1993/94 Series 1 hobby box, the oldest box in our range, is also the debut of the SP brand on hockey cards, at 1:80 packs.
The tiered sets
Black Diamond ranks its cards by rarity rather than by player: one, two, three or four diamonds, the same player appearing at every level. We carry the 2008/09 6-pack box, the 2009/10 hobby box with the 2009 draft class as Rookie Gems, and the 2011/12 hobby box with five guaranteed rookie cards and two memorabilia cards.
The premium end
Artifacts is built around multi-swatch memorabilia: the 2011/12 hobby box holds 10 packs with three multi-swatch cards, an autograph and two rookies. SPx is the loud one, holograms and die-cuts, with about seven hits in an 18-pack box. SP Game Used is the top: 6 packs of 3 cards, a memorabilia or autograph card in every pack, and in 2011/12 the 500 Goal Club.
Two products sit outside the ladder. Be A Player in 2008/09 was two packs and ten cards with a guaranteed autograph. Overtime in 2013/14 was sold only through two distributors, and its pre-order packs carry a fourth card, a Rookie Profiles card that exists in no other configuration.
Every product page describes the exact configuration of that box. Which players a box contains is random.
2008/09 Collector's Choice · 2009/10 Collector's Choice · 2011/12 O-Pee-Chee · 1993/94 Series 1
2008/09 Black Diamond · 2009/10 Black Diamond · 2011/12 Black Diamond
2011/12 Artifacts · 2011/12 SPx · 2011/12 SP Game Used
2008/09 Be A Player · 2013/14 Overtime pre-order pack
Read: Hobby, Retail or Blaster — What the Box Tells You
Leave a comment