2009/10 Upper Deck Fleer Ultra Hockey Retail Box | 36 Packs | Factory Sealed

A factory-sealed retail box of 2009/10 Upper Deck Fleer Ultra Hockey — 36 packs of 5 cards, 180 cards in total. Base set of 200 cards. Bilingual English and French packaging, with the NHL hologram seal. Joe Thornton on the front.

The man on the box holds a record nobody wants

Joe Thornton played 1,714 regular-season games across twenty-four seasons — more than any player in NHL history without winning the Stanley Cup.

It is not the record of a man who lacked ability. In 2006 he won both the Hart Trophy as most valuable player and the Art Ross Trophy as leading scorer, and the circumstances of the Art Ross make it stranger still: he was traded from Boston to San Jose in the middle of that season and won the scoring title anyway, playing for two clubs in one year. Nobody else has done that.

He reached one final, with San Jose in 2016, and lost it. He retired in 2022 having spent a career as one of the finest passers the league has seen, and without the thing the league measures careers by.

A box of rookie cards with Thornton on the lid is an accidental piece of framing: the man who had everything except the trophy, fronting a set full of players whose careers had not started.

180 cards against a 200-card set

This is the set-builder's configuration, and the arithmetic is worth doing before buying.

Thirty-six packs of five gives 180 cards. The base set is 200. So a single box comes closer to completing it than any other format of this release — and still does not get there.

It gets further away once the inserts are counted. Gold Medallion parallels fall 1:1, which removes 36 cards from the base count immediately. Ultra Rookies at 1:4 take about nine more, the four superstar insert series combine to 1:4 for another nine, and EX Hockey at 1:8 takes four or five.

What remains as plain base cards is somewhere around 120 of the 200 needed.

Which is precisely why set collectors bought several boxes and traded the overlap, and why manufacturers size base sets the way they do. A box that completed the set would be a box nobody needed to buy twice.

What else is in it

Ultra Uniformity jersey cards (1:12) feature Sidney Crosby, Carey Price, Marc-André Fleury, Eric Staal, Alexander Ovechkin, Ryan Miller and Jason Spezza.

EX Jambalaya (1:288) covers Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Crosby, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr, Jonathan Toews, Jarome Iginla, Patrick Kane and Patrick Roy. Fresh Ink autographs also fall 1:288 — both are case-level hits rather than box-level.

Ice Medallion parallels are numbered to 100, with ten per case.

Specifications

36 packs per box · 5 cards per pack · 180 cards · Base set: 200 cards · Factory sealed with NHL hologram · Manufacturer: Upper Deck · Brand: Fleer Ultra · NHL and NHLPA licensed

Stated insertion rates reflect an average across the entire production run; no ratio is guaranteed in any individual box.