Thursday, November 12, 2009

Blasters vs. Fat Packs. A study in contrast.

catchy title, huh? What the hell was I thinking when I wrote that? Feels like I'm back in eleventh grade english.
Anyways... today's post will highlight a comparison between buying fatpacks, and blasters. For today's example, I will use the brand new 2009/10 OPC Hockey.
To give an acurate comparison, I purchased 4 fat packs and 1 blaster. The price of 4 fat packs = the price of 1 blaster. Am I going too fast? Here we go....
This year's product went old school with Wayne Gretzky in his Oilers jersey. For you youngin's, Wayne was hockey's version of Brett Favre. He just kept coming back year after year wearing odd uniforms of various teams. It was a bit embarrassing after awhile.

The base cards have a silver border with accents in the player's team colours.
sometimes it works....
sometimes not so much...
sometimes it just doesn't...
You get 31 or 32 base cards in a fat pack, along with a chance at a retro parallel insert, or a rookie/legend card. Both inserted at 1:3. In my 4 packs, I got 3 retros, no rookies or legends.
I have no idea why these are called retro... they don't look like any other OPC hockey set I've ever seen. Kind of a letdown after the HUGE success of last years retros. See what lawsuits do? They ruin everything.
Onto the blaster. Wayne! Lookout behind you!!! Where's Semenko when you need him?
inside were 14 little packs, 6 cards each.
aside from the base cards, in the blaster I found Rainbow parallels 1:8
Rookies/Legends 1:2 (found 3 rookies...)
(... 4 Legends)
The base set is cards 1-500. Rookies and Legends make up cards 501-600.

Also found were various shiny inserts 1:4

and my favourite insert set, Canadian Heroes 1:72
somehow I managed to pull 2 of these. At 1:72 odds, 2 in 14 packs. I guess that's where the "on average" comes in.
Okay, so now that the pretty picture portion is over, let's get to the hard facts.
4 Fat Packs-
125 Base Cards (1-500) 3 doubles
3 Retros ( Zach Boychuk, Patrick Marleau, and Mike Bossy)
0 Rookies/Legends (501-600)
0 Inserts
1 Blaster-
62 Base cards (1-500) 0 doubles
7 Retros
7 Rookies/Legends (501-600)
8 Inserts
So for the same $$$, fat packs give you twice as many base cards towards your set. But no rookies. Or inserts. But I wouldn't want to build the set either way. With the ratio for rookies such as it is, you need to go the hobby box route. For $45 (blasters are $25) you'll get twice as many base cards, with a better chance for rookies/inserts.
So there ya go.... I'm doing this, so you don't have to.....

5 comments:

shoeboxlegends said...

Too funny, I bought a fat pack about 2 weeks ago, scanned in all the cards, but Blogger gave me fits when I uploaded all the images to the point where I abandoned the post. So...you literally did this so I don't have to! Thanks!

I'm not big on this year's OPC. I agree with you completely that the retro set doesn't resemble any past OPC sets I know, and that was one of the big selling points to me in last year's set. I'm not going to put myself through going for this set this year.

Great post!

thehamiltonian said...

UD made the Canadian Heroes inserts needlessly confusing this year.

There are two insert sets, with the exact same name. The ones featuring players in their Team Canada unis are easy, falling about 1:4 packs, then there is a rainbow foil version featuring Canadian players in their NHL unis that is the harder pull (1:36 for hobby).

Yeah, I thought I hit the jackpot too.

The Big Kahuna said...

Totally love the Cylon and the Gretzky rack pack!

Twitch said...

The retros sorta remind me of 1990-91 Fleer basketball. o.O

Sal said...

NOOOOOO!

Like Shane, I was going to do a write-up on this too. That's what I get for being lazy/busy.

But you said it in a less-verbose way than I was gonna, so props to you.

I also got two Canadian heroes cards--one regular and one shiny.