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Product Review: 2019-2020 Upper Deck Series 2

March 17, 2020, 7:06 PM ET [114 Comments]
Karine Hains
Montreal Canadiens Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
The NHL season might be on hold but the boxes of wax are still flying off the shelves in the stores (until they shut down too of course that is) and less than a month ago, Upper Deck released it’s annual Series 2 product. You know how they say you don’t change a winning formula? Sometimes, that applies to sports cards. Year in, year out, Series 1 and Series 2 are the most talked about products out there. Why? Well, firstly, they come at a reasonable price (about $115 taxes included in Canada) and secondly, they contain the hottest commodity in collecting, the rookies. You know, rookie cards like in the good old days when you started collecting? There isn’t 10 versions of them and they aren’t numbered they are just plain old rookies. Personally, I love this product so much because it doesn’t try to reinvent itself constantly. It knows what it is and it’s fine with it.

This year’s offering features 250 new cards, 198 bases, 3 checklists and 49 Young Guns. As per usual, Young Guns come once every 4 packs so if you get a 24 pack hobby box, you should get 6 rookie cards. Each box should also yield 6 O-Pee-Chee Update cards, 4 canvas, 4 Portraits Rookies, 2 O-Pee-Chee Retro Updates and 1 O-Pee-Chee Blue Foil Parallel. Like most set these days, there are parallels of the set but at least, there’s only 3 of them Clear Cut UD Exclusives, UD Exclusives numbered to 100 and High Gloss numbered to 10. If you are very lucky, you might pull a base set photo variation but they only come 1 per 1 100 packs. The popular canvas set is also back and now they come in 4 categories: Veterans, Young Guns, Retired Stars and Team Canada Program of Excellence. You can also add to that the 1/1 printing plates.

Of course, the product includes a few insert sets: Rookie Breakouts (numbered to 100 and featuring 20 rookies on acetate cards), UD Portraits Rookies which you can also find in Gold Foil numbered to 99 and Blue Foil numbered to 25, Shooting Stars Rookies (1 per 360 packs and an even more limited edition in red), Fluorescence which come in 4 different variations, Day with the Cup featuring 8 Blues players and the Rookie Material cards (1 per 55 packs) and Patch parallels numbered to 25. You can also find Rookie Dual Materials which feature 2 players as the name suggests and also come in Patch parallels numbered to 10 only. Finally, there’s also the Rookie Photo Shoot Flashback Materials which are as rare as the dual but offer Patch Parallels numbered to 15.

So, without further delay, here’s what our box yielded:

Canvas: C152 Cam Atkinson, C181 Philip Grubauer, C190 Jonathan Quick, C202 Sean Monahan
Rookie Portraits: P62 Joakim Nygard, P65 Tobias Bjornfot, P85 Max Jones, P95 Jesper Boqvist



OPC: 511Jack Hughes, 511 Jack Hughes (Blue), 619 Nicolas Hague Retro, 620 Danil Yuktaykin, 621 Tobias Bjornfot, 632 Carter Verhaeghe Retro, 643 Rasmus Sandin and 649 Jesper Bogqvist



Young Guns: 458 John Marino, 474 Givani Smith, 476 Pierre Engvall, 488 Alexander Volkov, 494 Klim Kostin and 499 Kaapo Kakko

Rookie Materials: RM-AF Adam Fox




Overall, this was a satisfying box to open. Was a bit worried by the Young Guns at first but Kakko showed up in the last pack and saved the day. It’s always a nice bonus to get a Rookie Materials card and the OPC rookies were pretty good ones. I can’t say I’m crazy about the Rookie Portraits design, they just remind me too much of when I was a kid and my mother would force me to go pose for a picture with the oh so very professional photographer at Sears (you’ve been there too admit it!). Aside from that though, I really do not have much criticism to offer on what is and has always been a winning formula.

Grades
Design: 4/5
Value: 4/5
Resale value: 4.5/5
Variety: 5/5
Break enjoyment:5/5
Final grade: 90%

Once again, thanks to Upper Deck for providing me with this box to review and if any of the hits interest you, please do let me know either on HockeyBuzz, Twitter or Sportscardforum.
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