Box Break: 2016-17 Upper Deck Series 1

Going on a pharmacy run now pretty much always means I look in the "electronics" section, between Minion clocks and DVDs of 13 Going On 30 to see if there aren't any boxes of cards.

Lo and behold, there were blaster boxes of Upper Deck's 2016-17 Series 1 cards going at $28 ($32 after taxes) for 12 packs of 5 cards, for a total of 60 cards. First off, the packaging is a tad misleading; sometimes UD don't mention "extra packs" (which is fine), sometimes they do. For some reason, I thought two extra packs meant 12+2 (14), not 12.

There were no doubles in the box, which is a good start.

There were five inserts, divided as follows:

Two Young Guns rookies of kids I like, the Philadelphia Flyers' Ivan Provorov and the Chicago Blackhawks' Gustav Forsling:

There was a gold-and-silver foil Shining Stars card of Evgeny Kuznetsov:

A Superstars Portrait of Sidney Crosby:

And a Canvas card of Jordan Staal:

The Young Guns cards look particularly nice, as does the regular-issue set, which looks like this from the front, with the sharp pictures UD has gotten us used to:

The backs are nice as well, the head shot cut from the picture on the front:

You can see from Roberto Luongo's card that they "only" display the last 12 seasons, as his doesn't show his New York Islanders statistics. You can also see from Alexander Wennberg's card that we shouldn't be surprised at how good he's doing this year, as he already led the Columbus Blue Jackets in assists last year and tied for Team Sweden's points lead with 8 points at the World Championships.

All told, it's a fairly nice set. I would have liked to pay around $20, $25 tops for 60 such cards, but I have a feeling the Provorov might net me half my money back if I put it on Ebay, which would enable me to send out the common cards to be signed at pretty much no cost.

I feel like I prefer the MVP set this year, so I'll give this one a 7.5/10.