Upper Deck announced on Tuesday that the flagship ‘Series One’ hockey card set will be released on October 18th as opposed to the traditional early November release.
Series One is considered the unofficial kick-off to the new year of hockey card collecting. It’s always a hot product due to the chase for the highly coveted “Young Guns” rookie cards of the year’s hottest freshmen.
Unfortunately, Connor Bedard was nowhere to be found on the checklist that Upper Deck released last week, meaning his highly anticipated Young Guns chase will have to wait until Series Two. However, there are still some top rookies to grab come mid-October including Matthew Knies, Devon Levi, and Luke Hughes.
Another interesting wrinkle that is creating a little more intrigue than usual is the overwhelming changes made to the product this year. Typically, each box contains 24 packs with eight cards in each pack with an average of six young guns per hobby box. However, earlier this year Upper Deck announced that they will be making sweeping changes to the configuration of the set.
-“For the first time in more than 20 years, we’ve changed the configuration (cards per pack/packs per box). We’ve also increased the number of inserts per pack and have expanded the base set parallel lineup. And while the configuration has changed, we’ve maintained the Young Guns® card count (6 per box, on average).”
The configuration is one thing, but an even bigger change that may shock collectors is the new parallels to the flagship Young Guns. Traditionally, this set featured regular base Young Guns, along with exclusives (#’d to 100), High Gloss (#’d to 10), clear cut, and canvas parallels. This year, however, there will be plenty more cards to collect with additional parallels numbered out of 250, 25, and the Outburst Gold one-of-one.
October 18th will sure be an exciting day for hobbyists. Happy collecting!