2016-17 Upper Deck The Cup hockey is a truly grand finale

With the release of the Upper Deck’s The Cup set on Wednesday, Oct. 25, the 2016-17 hockey card year officially comes to a close.

For NHL coaches and players, there is no bigger achievement than hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup at the end of a long season. For hockey card collectors, holding a tin of Upper Deck The Cup for the past decade creates a similar feeling of closure and satisfaction.

Upper Deck’s annual high-end release to close out the hobby year is full of autograph and unique memorabilia cards featuring the best rookies and veterans from the 2016-17 NHL season.

This year’s release again includes the autographed rookie patch cards that the set has become famous for, and with names like Auston Matthews in the class, they are extremely chase-worthy. Two such cards are guaranteed to come in each tin, but there is so much more.

According to a checklist compiled by Stephen LaRoche of Beckett, other traditional elements like a 100-card short-printed base set of veterans is augmented by several parallel versions of different foil colors. The several parallels come in differing degrees of rarity, ranging from being numbered to 12 all the way down to one-of-ones.

The same parallel versions are also available of the set’s rookie cards, in addition to the rookie autographs and the afore-mentioned autographed patch cards, which come in two different versions of rarity. There is a variety of the patch cards which are numbered to 249, and another which are numbered to 99.

Two inserts augment the base set. Championship Etchings is a 12-card subset highlighting the best talent from the 2016-17 season, with cards that are numbered to 15. Uncut Sheet Artist’s Proofs Redemption cards are exactly what the name suggests. The 12 different cards are tied to 12 different artist proofs from the set.

Collectors expect a set that both purports itself as the finale to a collecting year and as a high-end product to be filled with other autographs and relics that can’t be found anywhere else. Upper Deck doesn’t disappoint, and there is so much content that it’s hard to decide on what the highlights should be. There are on-card autographs, memorabilia offerings and combinations of the two in different presentations for every collector.

Limited Logos is back, pairing an on-card autograph with a swatch from the player’s jersey which contains a piece of the team logo. The cards are short-printed to 10, 25 or 50 depending on the player. Evgeni Malkin, Connor McDavid, Alexander Ovechkin are the three players who are numbered to 10.

Scripted materials, which are numbered to 35, feature the players’ autographs on the actual jersey swatch. Versions of that subset featuring two players, numbered to 15, are also available. As previously mentioned, these are not the sum total of the autograph and memorabilia cards in the set, merely a couple of highlights.

Upper Deck has picked up on a recent trend in collecting with the inclusion of booklet cards. They take it to the extreme, however, with a ridiculous 9-Way Signature Booklet, appropriately numbered to nine. As the name suggests, the booklet contains the on-card signatures of nine different NHL players.

The final element that has to be mentioned in an overview of the set is that this is truly a penultimate set for the year with the last content from Upper Deck’s Exquisite line and printing plates from different sets throughout the collecting season.

The biggest Exquisite hit that collectors can chase is the Exquisite Auto Rookie Shield. These 37 cards are all numbered one-of-one and yes, Matthews is on the list.

Next: 10 reasons Stanley Cup Playoffs are better than NBA Playoffs

For hockey card collectors, this is the set worth working toward all year for. In order to be worthy of comparison to the Stanley Cup, a set must be visually-appealing, full of chase-worthy cards and unique. Upper Deck has completed that hat-trick again this year.