2016-17 Upper Deck Ultimate Collection Hockey Cards

ePack annouced a few days ago that their Ultimate inventory was low so I went and snagged 10 boxes. I pulled a Matthews Auto /99, Guentzel Auto /99 Redemption, Brodeur Jersey Tag /3, and TWO Laine RPAs with one 4 color. I’ll recoup most of my cost on the secondary market with the Matthews card alone. Say what you will about ePack but I am more than pleased.

Bought my first box Saturday. Pulled a Auston Matthews Ultimate Rookie #/99. Stoke about it. Will be sending it to get graded.

I cracked an 8 box inner case and wow disappointed doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt. I got no rookie patch auto or auto #49 or less as stated and neither did my friend who opened the other 8 boxes. I also got to redemptions for the exact same player. Needless to say I like the design of the cards but the quality of hits just aint there for the price point!!

I AGREE WITH ONE OF THE COMMENTERS, ULTIMATE IN ITS EARLY YEARS WAS A GREAT PRODUCT BUT NOW ITS MEDIOCRE AT BEST. AS A COLLECTOR, I BROKE A CASE OF WAX. GOT A 1 OF 1 SHIELD OF A GOALIE AND A MALKIN PATCH AUTO TO 15. DIDN’T HIT ANY GOOD ROOKIE AUTOS. I ALSO AGREE WITH DRUG ZONE’S ADVICE TO ERIC, STOP BEREAKING WAX AND BUY PLAYER’S YOU LIKE ON SECONDARY. IF YOU ARE BREAKING HOPING FOR THE BIG SCORE LOTS OF LUCK.

Just ripped a box and WHAT A JOKE!! 2 all white swatches and ! auto of a defensman. If the auto is gonna suck at least give us poor collectors a patch in a pack I paid 150.00 for!! And 1 auto???? Another Upper Deck fail in my opinion. Ultimate was always one of my favorites, but not anymore. Its getting to the point that its not even enjoyable to open packs or boxes.

Just saw a few case breaks of this product.
First: 4 cards per pack. One common, one autograph, one patch autograph and one jersey.Second: Retaiil price +or- $150.00
Third: Common jersey patches are very small.
Fourth: Players selection is awful at best.
Fifth. It seems that Upper deck is now totally oriented towards group break with their products. Who in his right mind would pay 150.00 for 4 cards, 2 being “hits”.
Boy! You try hard not being negative but Upper deck is really ruining it for many local hobby stores and collectors.
Shame on you!

Checklist is lacking depth. As an Habs collector, only one Lehkonen card, and for veterans, only Price, Roy, Lafleur and a base Galchenyuk. I would be really excited to pull any of these, but I feel Pacioretty, Weber and Radulov would have deserved a place in that collection.

As an update to my post, many rookies are missing from SPA which is understood as some of those rookies are just not sought after except for team collectors. You can still say the same about the posted Ultimate rookie checklist. For me, Matheson and Demko should have autos. I’m sure more knowledgeable collectors will add more names to that list.

Same situation with UD as of late. Nothing new or exciting, very very weak legends/retired checklist and little value. This product has been dead in the water for years now. They changed Black Diamond (not sure for worse or better) time to change this. UD seems to lack the ability to adapt like they used to. They offer nothing unique anymore. They just raise prices and lower content without creative thoughts

Look at all the Domi update cards. Buy Arizona in breaks people, not only Domi but Duclair update cards. You also get Strome, Chychrun, Crouse, and Dvorak cards from this years rookie class. Arizona may have the most cards in this set.

On the flip side, poor Canucks collections. No rookies with autographs. Only Eriksson with autos in this product unless I missed something. Two shields, Eriksson and D. Sedin (from All-Star game).

Interesting there will be a Rookie Redemption in this product, wonder who that may be, perhaps Schmaltz?

No rookie autos for these teams noting players that had autos in SPA (may have missed some rookies):
Anaheim – Montour
Colorado – Bigras
Florida – Matheson
LA – Dowd
Minnesota – Reilly has Debut Threads Patch Auto but Ek has no autos
Nashville – Aberg
St. Louis
Tampa Bay – Point
Vancouver – Demko, Stecher, Tryamkin

A few potentially very good players in there. So if you buy one of those teams, right away you can’t hit 25% of the cards.

I would avoid team random breaks, unless the breaker combined teams and made the random out of 22-23 teams but that would take a forward thinking hockey breaker. Heard a hockey breaker say they wouldn’t do that as people will look at their prices and see it is more than other breakers. Hockey collectors must not be too bright or at least the breakers don’t think so.

@Eric,
totally understand your frustration. If you want rip it for the high end stuff to get a Matthews (or last year McDavid), you’ll get most likely disappointed.
If you rip packs to put cards on the secondary right away, you’ll get disappointed again.
If this is your intention … you better stay away of all high end products!!! Especially Ultimate, as it’s not ‘The Cup’ it doesn’t give you much in return, a 200$ Box might easily leave you with 20$ of secondary value (happened to me as well with the 15-16 version).

Nevertheless it’s not’s UD’s fault that the secondary doesn’t appreciate 99% of the Ultimate Collection cards (but still many are cracking), it’s a good product in general as you get what’s advertised.

Again, cards are nice, but I totally agree, you’ll feel like a fool if you go for boxes/cases afterwards, let the others take the losses and hunt the singles on the secondary …

Pure Upper-Deck here… 5 cards per pack in 15-16… 4 in 16-17… Keep laughing at their customers…. The only thing this company is taking care off is thinking about making more money each year… this product has no value on the market… lost over 2000$ on a case last year.. Avoid it……

The good thing with Ultimate is that all the autographs are on card, some of the designs are also pretty good so it definitely qualifies as high end for me.

The bad thing with Ultimate is that it’s very Jersey heavy and those aren’t very popular. A Auto patch is very rare and a difficult hit in Ultimate.
I also feel again that there’s a lot of redundancy within the product. The many subsets and parallels feature the same players (esp. Rookies) again and again.
Expect very little return for your Ultimate cards on the secondary if you don’t hit Matthews or Laine.

Beside the missing hit and most likely a cheaper price I don’t see much difference in the configuration to the previous year. Design of the mock ups looks decent though.

Word of advice, as Ultimate will be available on epack again I strongly recommend to be patient, as the Ultimate quest on epack will generate a lot of very cheap cards on comc at a later stage (just look for the 15-16 version of Ultimate)