2026-27 Upper Deck Hockey MVP Box Break

(team and product links go to sponsored Amazon products, player links go to related pages on my blog, news links go to source pages)

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to grab myself a box of the season's first set, Upper Deck's 2026-27 MVP (Retail version):

The main set has a nice futuristic, computer chip-y design that UD could have used on a more premium set (but I'm glad they didn't):

I miss when the backs had statistics from the previous five seasons, but having an anecdote for every single player is actually a pretty decent feat. The box cost me $80 (plus taxes, which amounts to $92) for 36 packs of 7 cards each - 252 in total. All told, I pulled 29 insert cards, which means I got 223 base cards.

As far as inserts go, here is how they break down: 6 Silver Scripts, a returning sub-set, of Sam Bennett, Tim Stützle, Nils Hoglander, Dylan Strome, Vincent Trocheck, and Alex Laferriere:

Now, granted, these aren't Young Guns from the flagship product, but folks are mostly chasing the Rookies cards, of which I pulled 7 (the first four of which I'm very happy to have): Nathan Gaucher, Anton Frondell, Konsta Helenius, Cole Hutson, Drew Fortescue, Avery Hayes, and Sandis Vilmanis:

Another returning sub-set is Clutch Performers, where I present you Nikita Kucherov and Carter Verhaeghe:

Paired Up features two players who at least ended the season on the same team, as seen here with Brady Tkachuk / Stützle of the Ottawa Senators and Kirill Kaprizov / Matt Boldy of the Minnesota Wild:

Gotta Have Hart is a good idea, but I'm on the mind that Nathan MacKinnon may have a better chance of winning it than William Nylander:

The Slot (possibly the heir to the "old" Net Crashers sub-set) sees Martin Necas and a pre-wealthy Leo Carlsson playing around the opposite goalie:

There were two Welcome Freshmen cards, of Danny Zhilkin and Angus Booth:

Another sub-set that is reminiscent of the past is Let It Rip!!!, with Boldy and Sidney Crosby:

But my very favourite sub-set this year is the (card-sized with rounded edges) Stickers. What a terrific design!

That's Josh Samanski, Vilmanis, Quinn Hughes and Necas.

Affordability and value are key issues in 2026, and the design of these cards make it a solid 8/10.

Blaster Box Break: 2022-23 Artifacts

(team and product links go to sponsored Amazon products, player links go to related pages on my blog, news links go to source pages)

I made a series of bad decisions today at Toys 'R' Us, including purchasing my kids clearance Ghosbusters and Incredibles plush toys that they ended up wanting noting to do with, but mostly having to do with knowing I had $35-40 of expendable money to put on hockey cards or McFarlane figurines, ending up deciding between blaster boxes of two Upper Deck products: 2022-23 O-Pee-Chee and 2022-23 Artifacts, at $43 plus tax apiece (essentially $50, above my target limit).

I should have steered clear, or at the very least gone with OPC, which was sure to get me double the amount of cards, and have them be easier to get signed as well. But no, I essentially played the lottery of 7 packs of 5 cards and paid more than a buck per card, got maybe three that I might be able to get signed (I'll probably end up aiming for ten, but I'm not confident at all), and was not giddy about any of the players I pulled. No Edmonton Oilers, no Colorado Avalanche, no Montréal Canadiens, no Calgary Flames, a single Ottawa Senators player.

Let's take a look at what I did get. First off, the set's theme this year is "blue". This used to be a set that had embossed textures, Egyptian-esque themes and colours relating to lost treasure and sand, like tones of grey, beige, light/nearly pastel versions of more traditional colours, with a classy bit of white to tie it all together. Not this year. It gets tackier every second I look at it, pretend British Royal drapes and a cheap design that a high schooler would have gotten down better:

At first glance, they look alright; the style is relatively reminiscent of past editions but definitely new, and the scan doesn't do the silver foil (ARTIFACTS brand, team logo and brand name), although the scan provides a depth to the blue artwork on the sides that the eyes can't even begin to see, kind of like when Advanced Stats had Benoît Pouloit as one of the best play-drivers in the league and yet everyone except Oilers GM Craig MacTavish knew that was absolute rubbish. this is worse than that. The backs feature five years of basic statistics as well as the player's height, weight, shooting side and birthdate (but neither birthplace, hometown or nationality).

Upper Deck having been infected by the O-Pee-Chee coloured variants/parallels virus since 2006-07, I did land three "Turquoise" parallels of Moritz Seider, Patrick Kane and John Carlson:

I exaggerated the green hue and put a bit of extra brightness on the filter to show that the foil is indeed a bit greener than just 'blue", but not all-out green, as that is probably reserved for the "Emerald" parallels.

The "one true hit" I got in this box is this "Indigo" parallel of Nicklas Backstrom, numbered 2/10:

Two things: the ink bled through its spots in both zeroes of the "02/10", which makes it look dirty, and the "/10" actually looks a lot more like "/18". I also don't know of diehard Backstrom fan communities where a member would take it off my hands at a decent value. If any ready knows of one, please, send them my way, it would be a shame if I let this one get destroyed out of neglect.

The entire set is comprised of 200 cards: 100 regular base cards, 35 "stars" (#101-135; short-printed at 599 copies each), 20 goalies (#136-155; also just limited to 599 per), 15 "legends" (#156-170; also limited to 599), and 30 rookies (#171-200; of which there are 999 of each, for some reason).

Please, please, please. PLEASE. STOP WITH THE RETIRED PLAYERS, and for fuck's sake, PLEASE DO NOT REFER TO ALL OF THEM AS LEGENDS. I pulled three, cards #160, 161 and 162 in the set, conveniently:

That is Matthias Ohlund, Teemu Selanne and Bernie Nicholls.

Selanne is a no-brainer Hall Of Famer. Consistently among the elite over a couple of decades, clutch both in his prime and in his decline, a decorated Olympian and Stanley Cup champion. He truly is a Legend.

Nicholls once scored 70 goals and twice scored 40 or more, and he has a 150-point and a 100-point season to his name. His peaks were high but he was merely very good compared to his peers for more than half his career, and he had a run with each team he's played on save for the Los Angeles Kings where he looked like his offense had completely dried up. He would need his lawyer to convice a panel of hockey experts that he belongs on a list of "legends".

Ohlund was the best defenseman on a Vancouver Canucks team that was in transition between the West Coast Express and Sedin Twin years, essentially holding the baton between two perhaps better defensemen in Jyrki Lumme and Alexander Edler. He did an admirable job, but unless I'm forgetting something, he pobably would have been a second-pair defender on a contending team.

Which brings me to this: Artifacts in a 200-player set in which the stars, rookies and goalies are relatively short-printed; 1004 skaters and 119 goalies suited up in at least one NHL game last year. Why waste ANY cardboard and ink on players whose cards can be found on Ebay for under a dollar at most and more commonly in penny bins at flea markets when half the players who actually suited in an NHL game in 2021-22 will not have their likeness on a 2022-23 product?

The colours on the "Legends" cards were spot-on, though. This should have been the main set's design.

For all these reasons, this box is the most disappointing one I've opened in a very long time.

2/10.

Box Break: 2020-21 Upper Deck Series 1 Hockey

(team and set links go to sponsored Amazon products, player links go to related pages on my blog, news links go to source pages)

For the past couple of months, every time I'd seen boxes of Upper Deck's 2020-21 Series 1 boxes, they were well over $200, because the market was going nuts for a certain rookie card. They're back around $120 at the moment for retail boxes, so I thought I'd give the product another try.

I was able to land a couple of foil Dazzler cards of Anze Kopitar and Sidney Crosby, though the Crosby is dented and has the bottom-right portion of the card bent:

It'll have no retail value, but my kids will be able to play with it and I won't get a heart attack if they tear it apart

I got three "regular-issue" Canvas cards, featuring Jonathan Huberdeau in a weird angle, Roman Josi playing soccer, and a view from the ceiling of Bell MTS Place of Kyle Connor (look closely, he's there):

There was also this great-looking Canvas Young Guns card of Pavel Francouz:

I pulled a jersey card of Braden Holtby, featuring three-dimensional round spots:

I guess I'll have to not only get used of the Portraits sub-set, but also of getting repeated duplicates of Jack Hugues, Max Domi and Nathan MacKinnon:

But this Portraits Rookie card of Martin Kaut was a pretty sweet pull:

Of course, the main reason why the cost of these boxes went sky-high is the Young Guns inserts, such as Lucas Carlsson and Martin Kaut:

There is also Artem Zagidulin and Ryan McLeod:

And, yes (FINALLY! On my second Retail box, after two Tins!) Alexis Lafrenière and Kieffer Bellows:

Of note, because of the closed border and confinement rules, the picture was taken at my alma mater, Collège Notre-Dame, where (former) NHLers Jean-Luc Grand-Pierre, Ben Guité, Mathieu Darche, Tom Draper and Alex Burrows also played, as well as Team Canada Olympians Ann-Sophie Bettez and Lauriane Rougeau.

10-Pack Break: 2020-21 Upper Deck Tim Hortons

(team and brand links go to sponsored Amazon products, player links go to related pages on my blog, news links go to source pages)

For reasons linked to confinement, lockdowns, an 8 PM province-wide curfew, 15-hour workdays and having a toddler at home, I was unable to head to a Tim Hortons store in the Fall for the annual tradiition that is buying a $2 tea or $3 small bottle of Coke Zero to buy a pack of Upper Deck's 2021-21 Tim Hortons cards at $1 instead of the "regular" price of $2, so I had decided to skip this year altogether, until I found a seller on Ebay who sold a 10-pack for $27, shipping included, essentially saving me the trouble of buying the drinks and cutting down my total costs by 30-40%. I'm not sure I'd buy another ten-pack, but I'm happy I got these 30 cards for the season.

First, here's a look at the base cards, front and back (spoiler alert, they're pretty similar to those of years past):

The foil looks good, the three-dimensional etchings are nice, and the back still has stats from the past five season as well as a call-back to the picture on the front.

There are also the usual Tim Hortons sub-sets, such as Gold Etchings, of which I landed Connor McDavid and Carey Price:

There's also a staple of the last few years, Red, featuring Price and Drew Doughty:

The All-Star Standouts cards are back, I pulled David Pastrnak, Jordan Binnington and Quinn Hughes:

I continued my luck of picking players from blue teams in the Clear-Cut Phenoms class with the Toronto Maple Leafs' Auston Matthews (instead of the usual Patrik Laine of years past):

Cup Winners are represented by Duncan Keith (it's actually a silver foil card to the naked eye):

UD also recycled the Canvas series from its signature series, with Pastrnak:

The Kucherov card is the only double I got, here's how the packs collated:

11: Jonathan Huberdeau
23: David Perron
26: Blake Wheeler
31: Carey Price
33: Dougie Hamilton
34: Auston Matthews
55: Mark Scheifele
58: Kris Letang
74: John Carlson
83: Max Pacioretty
85: Connor Brown
86: Nikita Kucherov (x2)
89: Reilly Smith
92: Evgeny Kuznetsov
95: Matt Duchene
101: Tyler Seguin
115: Frederick Andersen
121: Adam Henrique
123: Jeff Carter

Canvas:
C-8: David Pastrnak

Cup Winners:
CW-7: Duncan Keith

Standouts:
AS-5: David Pastrnak
AS-11: Jordan Binnington
AS-14: Quinn Hughes

Cleart-Cut:
CC-7: Auston Matthews

Red:
DC-18: Carey Price
DC-30: Drew Doughty

Gold Etchings:
G-1: Connor McDavid
G-9: Carey Price

It's still a solid set, worth an 8/10.

Box Break: 2020-21 Upper Deck Series 1 Hockey Tin

(team and product links go to sponsored Amazon products, player links go to related pages on my blog, news links go to source pages)

Whenever anyone asks me what I want for Christmas, the normal answers usually come out of my mouth: world peace, a job in hockey, and hockey cards. This year again, I was more than happy to receive a tin of Upper Deck's 2020-21 Series 1 hockey cards (buying from that link may result in my getting a commission for directing traffic). As mentioned previously earlier this month, I'm a big fan of the set, it looks and feels great. I had issues within my first break with many repeats, but I'm glad to say it didn't happen with the tin, fortunately, because having doubles of entire packs when there are just nine of them in total would have been insulting. Speaking of which, the tin came wrapped in a cardboard strip that looked like this front the front:

And like this on the side:

The way it says "8 packs per pack" and "10 packs per box" leads one to think there are 80 UD Series 1 cards plus the additional three O-Pee-Chee glossy rookie cards, but in fact, there were only nine packs of Series 1 cards and the OPCs came in their own foil pack, which brought the total card count to 75:

Speaking of which, two of them were seemingly of the regular-issue kind, Kiefer Bellows and Jake Evans:

The other one, featuring Josh Norris, was of perhaps a "Gold" variant:

In terms of standard UD cards, I was graced with three Young Guns, of Joel Kiviranta, Peyton Krebs and Evans:

I also landed a Canvas card of Rasmus Dahlin:

I pulled a Dazzlers card of New York Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin that appears golden to the naked eye, instead of pink like the scan:

And there were Portraits cards of Max Domi and Jack Hughes:

This means one of my packs had no inserts whatsoever, although I did get repeats fo the regular set Checklists that I had already gotten in my first box.

I couldn't have asked for a better present, but UD has to be more careful about how they label stuff, there could eventually be massive penalties in Canada from the many Consumer Protection boards resulting in millions of dollars in fines.

As far as this year's collection goes, I'm sticking with my original grade: 8.5/10.