2009/10 Upper Deck Artifacts Hockey Retail Box | 24 Packs | Factory Sealed

A factory-sealed retail box of 2009/10 Upper Deck Artifacts Hockey — 24 packs of 5 cards, 120 cards in total. Memorabilia and autograph cards are randomly inserted, along with rookie cards and rookie redemption cards.

Retail and hobby are not the same box with a different label

This is the retail configuration, and it is worth understanding what that means before buying, because the difference is real.

A hobby box of Artifacts guarantees its hits. The memorabilia and autograph cards are part of the specification — you know before opening that a certain number are inside.

A retail box does not guarantee them. The wording is "randomly inserted", and that is precise rather than evasive: the cards exist in the print run, they fall at some rate across it, and no individual box promises one.

Manufacturers do this deliberately. Hobby product goes through card shops to people who know what they are buying and will pay for certainty. Retail goes to a wider counter at a lower price, and the way to reach that price is to remove the guarantee rather than the possibility.

Neither is dishonest. What matters is not mistaking one for the other — and a page quoting hobby odds on a retail box would be doing exactly that.

Artifacts as a brand

Artifacts sat above the everyday sets and below the premium ones, and its identity was the card stock: thick, heavy, layered, with memorabilia windows built into the design rather than punched into a thin base card.

The tiering runs through the whole set, and the numbering gets steep quickly — which is the point of a mid-tier product. It has to feel more substantial than a base set without costing what a premium one does.

The 2009 rookie class

2009/10 is the John Tavares year — first overall in the 2009 draft, and later the captain who took the New York Islanders out of a decade of irrelevance before moving to Toronto.

The class also includes Victor Hedman, second overall and a Norris Trophy winner with Tampa Bay, Erik Karlsson, who has won the Norris three times, Jamie Benn and Ryan O'Reilly, a Conn Smythe winner.

It is a deeper class than it looked at the time.

Specifications

24 packs per box · 5 cards per pack · 120 cards · Retail configuration · Factory sealed · Manufacturer: Upper Deck · Brand: Artifacts · Season: 2009/10

Memorabilia and autograph cards are randomly inserted and are not guaranteed in any individual box.