Break Recap - Upper Deck Series 1 Break #1 - 11/11/18

Upper Deck Series 1 released last Thursday, so we decided to get in on the chase for Young Guns by breaking a few boxes. The NHLPA has a rule stating no player can be featured on a licensed trading card until appearing in an official NHL game. This means that Upper Deck Series 1 is the first opportunity to pull a player's primary (and most popular) rookie card, known as "Young Guns". Upper Deck Series 1 has a 250 card base set featuring 50 Young Guns rookies. There are also several insert sets, some common and some very rare. Autographs are a case hit and jersey cards fall roughly one every other box on average. We were rewarded on our Young Guns search with one of the bigger rookies in the set: the first overall pick in the 2018 NHL Draft, Rasmus Dahlin!

The Dahlin is one of the top 3 young guns in the set, so that is obviously a big "hit" for the break. We also opened three Canvas Young Guns (Dermott, Hronek, Jokiharju) and a Clear Cut Young Guns (Gersich). We got one "traditional" hit in a Johnathan Drouin jersey card for Montreal. We also pulled two UD exclusives (parallel of base set /100), Pominville and Butcher. Another nice surprise was the Shooting Stars black parallel of Matthew Barzal. The design of the base set focuses on the photography and has a simple, clean bottom frame. The Young Guns border is not my favorite this year due to the weird use of white space on the bottom and right sides giving the illusion of being off-center. This was a good break since we picked up one of the major Young Guns in the set alongside some of the upper-mid tier guys like Heiskanen for Dallas and Dermott for Toronto. This set definitely is not intended for hit chasers as it is a low to mid-tier product. Set builders will be pleased as there are quite a few fun insert sets to build and the boxes are fairly priced for what you pull on average. Look forward to opening some more in the future. Would like to see a Pettersson or Kotkaniemi opened!

GRADE THE BREAK

B+

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