Artifacts 11/12: Last Packs

Artifacts 11/12 is the best product yet of the 11/12 products. Bar none! This product is loaded with patches and low numbered cards. It also has some new inserts such as rookie redemptions for the top draft picks where the cards are numbered out of 99 and will be hard signed. The patches, autos, and low-numbered cards also feature solid players and as a collector you know that buying a few packs or a box will yield great cards that are worth the price you paid. This cannot be said for many products and is why Artifacts for the 11/12 product season is now sold out at my local store and at pretty much every other local store! Last year, Ultimate and Upper-Deck series II were the same way; loaded with excellent cards that gave back a reasonable investment in purchasing the product. I'm not saying that every pack one buys should have a Gretzky auto or something of a similar ilk. All I'm saying is that if companies continue to produce a product of high quality like Artifacts 11/12 where you know that in a box you will find an excellent patch card or a low numbered auto, then the product will sell out! Quality over quantity please!

On my most recent adventure to the card store I was told that there were only 5 packs left of the Artifacts 11/12 product. I scooped these up and have no regrets. Below is what I pulled from these 5 packs and from a previous group of 3 packs that I bought last February.

From the previous group of packs I pulled (most notably), a Kruger rookie emerald card numbered out of 99 and a Doughty jersey/patch card numbered out of 35! The Doughty patch is very nice with a 4 colour break and total of 3 colors from (presumably) the team emblem located on his shoulder. I love that out of only a few packs I pulled a low numbered parallel rookie and a beauty of a patch. Great cards!

The most recent, and unhappily final packs I bought revealed one of the best cards I have pulled in a long time. This was a jersey auto base parallel numbered 10 of 10 of Taylor Hall. The card is amazing and features one of the biggest rookies of last year, not to mention that it is super limited with only 10 made. One feature I really enjoy is that the card is numbered 4 in the series, which is his jersey number. I had not noticed this before, but all the jersey, patch, and auto variants of the base set are numbered according to that particular player's jersey number. A very nice touch.

The second card I pulled is sweet but nowhere near the level of excitement as the Hall. Thankfully I pulled this card first so it was not overshadowed by the Hall! This card was a Tundra Trios of Backstrom, Ovechkin, and Semin, numbered out of 149. This is in the same subset series as the Trios card I mentioned in an earlier post about Artifacts that featured three Canadiens. The Capitals' Trios card looks brilliant and made all the better by each jersey swatch being of a different colour: white, red, and navy. Also making this card even more attractive is that it features a jersey swatch from Ovechkin, which is something rarely pulled.

The final 5 packs I opened also featured a few weaker cards, such as a Legends, Star, and one Rookie card, each being serial numbered and considered the hit of the other three packs. While these cards would not set your world afire if they had been all that you had pulled, the Trios and Hall make up for it in spades. Also is the fact that the Trois and Hall had come from the same box, which either card would have made earlier products seem like the box or perhaps case hit. As I said before, I don't expect to find an amazing card in every pack, but I do expect at least one pack to have that amazing hit which makes the box or handful of packs worthwhile. I truly hope that companies like UD continue loading up their products to make collectors like myself feel that buying their products is a worthwhile investment. If they do so, then I believe the card market will continue to increase and be a thriving marketplace.