Box Break Review: 2018-19 MVP

The 2018-19 NHL season is here, as my pre-ordered box of MVP showed up on Thursday! The first new set of the year is really more of a set for the 2017-18 season, as none of the player movements are noted on the card- everyone is still with their 2017-18 teams. Even so, it's the start of the season, and contains the first cards of the players who got in too late to be included in last year's sets.

In my box I ended up getting 140 of the 250 base cards, 12 parallels, 7 inserts and one insert parallel. There were no duplicates in the box, which is a plus. Unfortunately there were no serial numbered cards either, but MVP is not a set where you expect that anyway.

This is my first card of the new season:

The design is pretty nice this year, better than MVP has been in several years in my opinion. We get a mostly full photo with some whiteouts at the top and bottom, and a large metallic bronze border on the left side only. (The SPs feature gold, which scans exactly as the bronze does, and the rookies are brown). For the past several years the MVP set has had the photos digitally altered to just be the player in front of some computer generated design, this is MUCH better.

This is the rookie design.

Although it doesn't really show up in scans, the border and the MVP wordmark are printed in metallic ink. I got six of the rookies. Cards #201-250 are short printed, which means I don't think I will be able to complete the set- most of the game's superstars are cards #201-219.

I got 12 new people for my collection, more than half of them rookies. While I won't be showing them all now (I need them for my New People added in August post) I will show one now, a player I've been wanting to add to my collection for a while now:

Nico Hischier was the first player I ever saw get drafted in to the NHL, so that's kind of a big deal. He had a great season with the Devils last year and will be a major building block for them for a long time. He's also the first player I feel like I "discovered"...when I first began watching the sport I didn't know too much and was watching the World Junior Tournament. I didn't know what that was yet, but he was playing in it and tearing it up. I distinctly remember thinking "Why is he not in the NHL?" and then I learned, by listening to the announcers. Shortly after, he was drafted, and by one of my semi-local teams as well!

Honestly, his may be my favorite card of the box, actually.

There are 9 different parallels in this set, 1 of which is retail only so I had no chance to pull it, but I only pulled cards from two of them:
 Silver Script...

and Puzzle Back:

I like the Silver Script a lot more. The Puzzle backs would be cool if you could build an entire puzzle, but I'm pretty sure the puzzles are just larger images of the base cards so it's not really a huge goal for me to do that. I ended up with 6 of each parallel.

The set is light on inserts, but they are pretty good ones. The main draw this year is the 20th Anniversary set, which is 100 cards in the style of the 1998-99 set.

I only got four of them, unfortunately. I would have liked to have gotten more, but I'm a big fan of retro cards so I would have been totally pleased if they did the entire set in the throwback design. There is also a Gold version, and this year's Colors & Contours set is of this insert, instead of the base, and is SN198, or the super rare Colors & Contours Purple which are SN8. I saw some online but was not lucky enough to pull any myself.

The other insert is NHL Player Credentials, which use several designs in the one set.

Although it's really hard to see in the scan, the corners are rounded and the entire white part of the card is printed on what I call holofoil camouflage, it looks like the pattern on modern military uniforms but in holofoil. You can sort of see it on the black bar with the team name.

The one thing I dislike about this insert is that it doesn't have numbers- the number for this card is NHL-EK. Lettering inserts instead of numbering them drives me nuts.

I ended up getting three of the 40 cards in this insert

I was also lucky enough to pull an Autographed Parallel of the NHL Player Credentials insert, which are the only autographs to be found in MVP!

This was my first card of Dermott...but the base card, shown above in this post, was literally the next card out of the pack!
The odds of pulling this card were one in 267 packs, so I did pretty good, I think. Note that the autographed version has gold accents instead of the non-autoed version which has silver. Only 33 of the players signed for the parallel, but some of them are big names so I know completing it won't ever happen.

I was not lucky enough to pull any of the Buybacks. They inserted apparently the entire 220 card 1998-99 MVP set as Buybacks into this product, but they are all SN20, so they are not common.

I posted every scan on to one of my secondary backup blogs, which you can see HERE if you want to. Both front and back. They are all posted on the Trading Card Database as well.

One funny thing I noticed when I was scanning the box to post to the Database-

Upper Deck accidentally labeled it 17-18 on the tail end cap. I have to be very careful not to label the scans as that way as well- each new season usually sees me having to retype the labels a few times to reflect the correct year, and this is no exception, as I originally labeled the Puzzle Backs as 2017-18 releases. Oops! I think it's a given that in 2019-20 I'll label something as 2018-19, or as I typed the first time just now, 2081-19. I'll be 97 in 2081, yikes.