2011/12 Upper Deck Artifacts Hockey Hobby Box | 10 Packs | Factory Sealed

Artifacts is the set built around the swatch. Not one piece of jersey per card but two, three, sometimes four, and paired so the combination means something — Gretzky with Sakic, Crosby with Malkin, Price with Subban. The 2011/12 edition is the one where Upper Deck pushed that idea hardest.

Every box carries three multi-swatch memorabilia cards, one autograph, two rookie cards, one rookie redemption and one parallel. Nothing in the memorabilia checklist is numbered higher than 175, and most of it sits at 135 or below. From there it thins fast: Treasured Swatches and Frozen Artifacts in the patch-and-stick Red parallel are numbered to 10, the Tundra Trios triple fight-strap cards to 5, and the Autographed Regular Card Materials in Black to a single copy. Tundra Tandems with dual tag patches are also one of one.

The base set runs to 100 cards with a Legends and Stars subset numbered to 999, and the parallel ladder climbs from Emerald at 99 through Spectrum at 25 to Black at 5. The rookie class covers Cody Hodgson, Adam Henrique, Matt Frattin, Joe Colborne, Blake Geoffrion, Yann Sauve and Erik Gustafsson. Released on 23 September 2011. This box is new and factory sealed.

Every box holds 10 packs of four cards, with one autograph, three memorabilia cards, two rookies, one rookie redemption and one parallel.

Please note about the redemption card: every box contains one Artifacts Rookie Redemption card, and the redemption window for these closed on 24 August 2013. Upper Deck no longer exchanges them. The redemption cards can still be collected as cards — the checklist includes Gabriel Landeskog, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Sean Couturier, Ryan Johansen, Brandon Saad, Mika Zibanejad and Adam Larsson — but the card cannot be traded in for the rookie card it names. We would rather you knew that before buying than after opening.

Printed in English by Upper Deck. For a collector chasing multi-swatch memorabilia of the sport's biggest names, this is one of the more generous mid-range boxes of its era.