Break Recap - NHL Artifacts 2-Box Break - 10/29/18
10/29/18 ended up being a milestone day for The Card Swap for a couple reasons. First, we ripped our first hockey product on the channel (definitely more to come!). Second, we pulled our first true one of one in The Card Swap history! Upper Deck Artifacts is a set focusing primarily on relics/memorabilia cards with a 100 card base set and numbered short prints for a selection of stars, legends, and holdover rookies. The holdover rookies are players whose first NHL game occurred last season following the release of Upper Deck Season 2, so mostly players getting called up from the AHL or being signed from juniors in the last few weeks of the regular season or playoffs. There are also a handful of jersey/auto hits of top rookies from last season. A box will contain 3 hits on average with a hit being an autograph, relic, or Aurum bounty card and also guarantees a rookie redemption card. We actually ended up scoring 7 hits out of our two boxes, a couple of which were pretty huge. We also lucked out in that none of our hits were Aurum bounties!
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The obvious highlight of the break is the Travis Dermott patch, tag, auto rookie card 1 of 1. We also managed to snag a Carey Price patch memorabilia Emerald parallel numbered to 25. We picked up three legend parallels of Lemieux (/349), Fuhr (/99) and Paiement (/99). Our rookie redemptions were Toronto and Montreal base rookies. The redemption rookies for this set and Upper Deck MVP are typically announced in January and shipped out 1-2 months after that. The design of the set in general is very classy with some excellent framing and decent use of color with the parallels. The memorabilia cards also sport a really sleek design. Overall, I would say that this was an outstanding break considering the historical significance, the quality/variety of the hits, and the outstanding dedication Aaron showed by running the break after breaking his tooth on a piece of Halloween candy just prior to going live (while only messing up 15% of the player names!)
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