Free box of Upper Deck!

It's hard to believe that people would pay $72 for a box of these cards considering that the base set is worth nothing and most of the inserts aren't worth much more than that. I guess the point is to pull some exclusive hd-high gloss-parallel-autographed-game worn-rookie card and sell it on eBay for a pile of money. But if you don't get one of the few boxes that have those cards, then you're pretty much stuck with a pile of worthless cards. 07-08 is the new 91-92.

This box was free, so the price was right, and even though I already had the base set it was fun to open a box of hockey cards without the guilt of having spent a lot of money on it. One of the best things about this box was that out of the 192 cards in the box (24 eight-card packs) there wasn't a single double. Upper Deck was always the worst for that back in the 90's. The box of 93-94 Jumbo Packs that I opened recently was almost one-third duplicates, including quadruples of every Swede's favorite Belarusian, Alexander Andrijevski.

Out of my 192 cards, I got almost exactly what the box said I would: 172 base cards, including all the superstars like Sidney Crosby and Dan Cloutier; six Superstar insert cards, including Andrew Raycroft and Dwayne Roloson,'Hometown Heroes', Ryan Miller and Jarome Iginla, 'NHL's Best', Phil Kessel 'Award Winners' (the Masteron trophy is tied with the Lady Byng for lamest award in my books), and Scott Niedermayer's 'Lord Stanley's Heroes' card where it looks like he had to clip the bird shit out of his disgusting homeless-man beard; six Young Guns rookie cards-- I got some pretty marginal 'guns' in this batch-- Matt Niskanen, Ryan Callahan, David Krejci, Jared Boll, Daniel Winnik and Curtis McElhinney; Mark Stuart and David Legwand Game Jersey cards, and probably the only card actually worth more than a buck-- the 'Signature Sensations' Martin St.Louis autograph.

By my estimation, these cards are worth, at most, $35 if sold individually, which means I would have lost about $40 if I had purchased the box and was looking for a profit. I wish that Upper Deck would at least put enough cards in the box so you have the chance of getting the full base set when you buy a box. For $72 it's the least they could do, especially since it would only take one more card per pack.

All of these cards are up for trade. Make me offers of Pro-Set t-shirts, as well as weird and terrible hockey cards.