Review: 2022-23 UD Artifacts Hockey Retail

Summary

2022-23 UD Artifacts Hockey Retail is a typical Upper Deck offering - high quality cards at a moderately inflated price. The "quality" descriptor doesn't extend to all facets of the card, however. There are numerous quality control issues with this product - more on that below. At the price point these retail boxes demand, I expected better hits. For retail, I don't expect 1/1 signed patches, but I do expect better than two /599 parallels in a box that costs $75.

Quality Concerns

The quality of the cardstock and printing are quintessential Upper Deck - beautiful cards for the most part. But there are a few issues with the attention-to-detail in some of the prints. For example - out of 6 retail boxes that I broke, there were 6 #28 cards (Maxime Comtois). Every single one of those cards had a small but noticeable printing error at the top-left corner of the back of the card, just above the card number. Again, for $75 per box, I expect better

The biggest quality concern is the foil stamping on these cards. The serialized stamping is inconsistent at best - on many cards, the numbers are almost illegible. Further, the team logos stamped to the bottom of the cards are terrible. Unique logos like St Louis, Detroit, or Minnesota are a bit easier to see due to the die-cut outline of the logo. But any team with a circular logo (Boston, Toronto, NY Islanders), the logos are barely distinguishable from each other.

Number stamping is inconsistent, and sometimes just plain unreadable

Card Design

While I usually am a big fan of Upper Deck overall and love their clean designs - this one confused me. What the hell are those tassel things on the sides of the cards? We have seen similar questionable graphics gratuitously printed on sets before. Perhaps I am just old-school and enjoy a clean card with great photography and printing. This design would have been infinitely better if they had stopped at the blue background and side graphic, and left the vertical tassel things off. The back of the card is clean with just enough player data to keep me interested without cluttering it with uselessness. I really like the design aspect of the foil stamping, but as described above, they screwed up the quality of the stamping. Perhaps I am just old and can't see well enough anymore, or the light stamping was intentional.

Box Hits

This retail product claims to have two hits per box - which it does, but I wouldn't exactly call them "hits." Out of 6 boxes of this retail product, I pulled 14 "hits." I keep putting that in quotes out of frustration with what Upper Deck is calling a hit. It all started off great, pulling an elusive - and exclusive to retail and blasters - Spectrum Jungle /15, but went downhill from there for a few boxes. Of the 14 hits, 7 were numbered /199 or higher. In the mix was one auto (Cozens) and one memorabilia card (Doughty). Also pulled a Rookie Redemption for Nashville - which is arguably the most valuable pull (tied in online value with the Cozens auto at $14 at the time of this writing).

While the Spectrum Jungle might be low number and therefore elusive, they aren't all that different - just a prism logo and a /15 stamp. There are literally no other differences from regular base cards. A bit of research on prior sales and valuations of the Spectrum Jungles puts most of them around the $10 mark. The rest of the numbered hits demand around $2-4 each.

Box Value

Overall, this product has a greater on-paper value than the cost of the box, but good luck selling any of the base cards. As you can see in the Breakanomics section below, the average box value (using a mix of online resources) is about $102.92 (over these 6 boxes). At a cost of $75 each (which went down to $65 shortly after my purchase), this is a decent 35.5% ROI. Again, though, that depends on your ability to offload the base cards.

Read more box break reviews - https://www.lastfew.cards/reviews