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.

My first NHL blaster

Due to health related financial considerations, I really can't do hobby boxes all that often anymore. I'm limited pretty much to blasters. Not that there's anything wrong with that, really, other than the fact that you don't have the opportunity for some of the inserts- but hey, I'm a base card guy anyway, and I'm thrilled I'm able to get anything, so every blaster I can get my hands on is a treasure.

I did my first blaster of NHL cards last week, one of 2016-17 Upper Deck Series 1. I don't normally break down blasters, but since it is my first one ever for the sport, I will give it the full Box Break Review treatment. Which means, of course, that I will select 9 base cards to showcase, plus inserts and rookies.

My very first card from the season where I became a hockey fan. That's something special!

 My first card showing the electronic sign boards, which I didn't know even existed until very recently.

 Jaromir Jagr has been in the NHL since 1990. That's unbelievable and I'm glad I discovered the sport while he was still active. To put things in perspective, in 1990-91 I was in Kindergarten. (I was already a card collector by that point as well...although not sports cards)

 Now I have the famous puppy card!

 Just a great photo.

 Brent Burns is in the early lead as a favorite player. He refers to himself as Chewbacca, makes Chewbacca noises, and wore a Chewbacca mask at last year's all-star game. How could you not like that?

 I think that's the face my mom made when she read the blog where I announced I was now a fan of the NHL...something I had managed to keep secret (somehow)

 One thing I'm particularly enjoying is seeing the ads on the boards. Oscar Mayer! Yum.

 My second card of the year. While my favorite logo is that of the Senators, the Jets' logo is pretty high up there too.

Now, we move on to the Young Guns rookie cards, of whom I pulled two.

 If what I've gathered is correct the Maple Leafs have several of the top rookies of the season.

 I can't say I've ever heard of either of them, but...I've only been "all-in" on the sport for about 3 weeks, so I still have a whole lot to learn. There are teams I have not even seen play yet. When I got into the NBA it took me until my second season to see every team and it might be the same here. I hope not, but the NHL doesn't have as much TV presence as the NBA does.

 I only got one UD Canvas card.

This year's UD Portraits insert is slightly more interesting than the 2015-16 set, mostly because of the blue border. The 2016-17 set is very blue in theme. This is currently my only card of Kucherov.

The last insert I pulled is a Shining Stars of Brent Burns, card #SS-1 in the set. I'm happy to get another of him, but I am not a big fan of mirror foil cards. However, it didn't seem to have as much a problem with scanning as most mirror foils do.

One thing I am curious to see, and I won't be able to know for years, is if NHL will hold true to the first two sports I follow, in that the second year I was in the sport is the favorite. For NASCAR, 1993 was my first year collecting and 1994 is my favorite year of cards, for the NBA I began collecting in 1995-96 and 1996-97 is my favorite year of cards. So, I got into the NHL in 2016-17, so will 2017-18 be my favorite year of cards? Only time will tell- I didn't stop and think about it being the second year as my favorite until only a year or two ago so it will take time to find out. I don't know even now if it was because it was my second year, or if it was because it was the 1990s, the best decade for cards.

Thanks for reading- I've certainly enjoyed the opening process, and I've really been enjoying the sport. To be honest I've been watching it more than the NBA lately, but that may just be because it's "new"...either way come tomorrow I'll be trying to watch three sports live on a regular basis, so I have to plan each day's TV watching in advance!