As usual, I bought myself a few
Upper Deck Tim Hortons packs this year to see if I liked them, and to have "special and unique" cards to try to get signed. At $1.99 per three-card pack, these have been consistently priced for nearly half a decade, which I guess is a good thing.
They also consistenly look good, although they usually come curved, so it's nearly impossible to get true gem mint cards in a given pack. Still, you can't say that these don't look terrific:
I chose to feature
Pierre-Luc Dubois' back, which consists of only one season, but it's good to note that the cards show the semi-detailed stats from the past five years, with career totals.
I landed five
All-Star Standouts inserts, which look like this:
That's
Auston Matthews,
Carey Price (twice),
Sidney Crosby and
Connor McDavid. Hard to do better, even if it's only for the trade value of the Matthews, Price and Crosby (any takers?).
I also fell upon three nice foil
Game Day Action cards of
Evgeni Malkin,
Nikita Kucherov and
Brad Marchand (not pictured, of course):
My favourite sub-set, though, is probably
Superstar Showcase, for which I pulled McDavid, Matthews and
Taylor Hall (not pictured):
The set does its best to feature the biggest stars, the best youngsters and a few players per team, all within a 120-card checklist that includes former Leaf
Tim Horton himself, which means that for a
Kyle Palmieri and
Rasmus Ristolainen inclusion, there is a
Dustin Byfuglien,
Ryan Ellis or a
Thomas Chabot missing.
It's a hard and expensive set to complete (I have never completed a series myself), but a very nice collection to just get cards for fun from, which makes it a very good flashback/nostalgia piece, bringing me back to the days when, as a kid, I couldn't afford more than a pack of cards per week, maybe two, and it was more about the fun of seeing what I was going to pull and trying to trade for a
Patrick Roy or a
Wayne Gretzky than completing a series.
The player selection and price bring this note down, but the look and card stock make up for it. This is a solid 7.5/10.
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