Upper Deck ePack & COMC: The Perpetual Race To The Bottom

(A version of this article appears on Puck Junk, July 16 2024)

In January 2016, Upper Deck launched an online platform that gave collectors a way to collect and trade digital trading cards. They called this platform e-Pack. As part of that experience, they added the ability to parlay those digital cards, via the act of “combining” various quantities, to create actual physical cards. For the user, the process was simple: collect cards, trade cards, or have your cards shipped directly to you. 

At the same time, Upper Deck also announced a partnership with an online marketplace to act as the fulfillment center for their physical product. That marketplace was Check Out My Cards, or COMC as the hobby has grown to know it. After the initial glitches were worked out, it became an easy way for collectors and users of their platform to make a few bucks on their digital-to-physical cards. Emphasis on a few bucks.

It didn’t take long for users of e-Pack to move their newly acquired online treasures over, thus eventually flooding the COMC marketplace with dozens – and sometimes hundreds – of the exact same card. After-all, at that time where else could collectors get the Silver Foil Board parallels of Upper Deck Series One, or in later years, the Gold Foil Board or Speckled Rainbow parallels?

That answer? Nowhere, really.

Because unless someone paid that initially large shipping fee to have the cards sent to them from Upper Deck, these cards only existed within that universe. Are there exceptions to this? Of course. But the majority of those at the time paying for the shipping were most likely collectors and those cards were destined for PC item status. Dealers didn’t have them either because they couldn’t be obtained from packs/boxes and weren’t widely available individually for sale. I would venture to guess that, at the time, many dealers did not participate in e-Pack, let alone even know of its existence. Take a poll at your next card show and you may even get the same results.

COMC, however, quickly became the spot (and still is) for getting any and all e-Pack exclusive cards. That also meant that would-be sellers had to make a choice of either waiting for a shipment or opting for instant transfer (well, almost instant) to their online COMC inventory, where they could quickly get items listed and priced for sale. No waiting, no hassles, no listing fees, no scanning, no seller annoyances at all really and that seems pretty appealing for most.

So where are all these e-Pack/COMC Millionaires? I wish I could answer that question and say, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them. On the surface, the marriage between the two companies was a no-brainer. Selling cards takes time and money. When things take that much time, theoretically one would think it would then translate to its own heightened value.

I’d be kidding myself to answer that way. Like anything, I’m sure there are exceptions to this and if you are one of the early adopters of the e-Pack flip game and made a mint, good on you. But the overwhelming scenario didn’t abide by those results and that pattern continues year after year.

The ease and convenience of converting your online cards to physical specimens and listing for sale all with a few clicks of the mouse drew thousands of users to both platforms. In just a few seasons of hockey card releases, the COMC marketplace saw tsunami level amounts of e-Pack product become available for purchase on its platform. Collectors jumped at the chance of being able to buy exclusive product directly through a platform that had competitive pricing and hadn’t already saturated other marketplaces. Don’t like the asking price? Make an offer. It works for both buyer and seller alike.

Soon though, as it always inevitably does, basic economic principles like supply and demand reared their ugly head. As more copies of the exact same card were listed on COMC, sellers were forced to compete by adjusting their prices.

As a seller, you certainly don’t want to have the high price tag when there are five other sellers offering the same card for less than yours.

You spend roughly $24 USD for a pack of 2023-24 Upper Deck Series Two on e-Pack – and it has a Young Guns rookie card in it. OK, great. Then, you spend time doing another 10 or 15 trades to acquire five more copies of the same card so you can combine it and get the Silver Foil Board parallel version. Surely, that card – after transferring it to COMC – would be worth $65, right? 

But what if there were 10 of them?

How about 20?

Or 40?

What if there were 150 other people selling the exact same card as you, in many cases multiple quantities, all for a penny less than you?

Easy. Lower your price two cents. That’ll show ’em.

But tomorrow, here’s one for a couple bucks less. OK, I see what they’re doing. I’ll drop mine by $5. But now there’s one for $7 less. You see where I’m going with this.

For example, the other day I was looking at the e-Pack exclusive Upper Deck MVP Pack Wars redemption card of Patrick Roy. MVP Pack Wars requires the purchase of specifically designated packs available on the platform. These packs are used in head-to-head competition between other users of the site. I’ll just use that value at $7.49 USD per pack for reference (one pack gets five Ice Battles cards). As you battle, you gain points and depending on where you rank on the leaderboards, you can win prizes, many of which are exclusive to the game and the platform. This can be all sorts of things like limited parallels, redemptions, printing plates, etc. Fun? Yes. Expensive? Also, kind of yes. 

To obtain that Patrick Roy card, you need to redeem a full Ice Battles set. That’s 250 cards. As already mentioned, there are five Ice Battles in a Pack Wars pack. Do the math. That’s $374.50 worth of digital packs.

So, wait a minute, DFG. You’re telling me that Patrick Roy Pack Wars Exclusive Redemption card is worth $374.50?

Why, ye…absolutely…NOT! That’s what it would take to earn it through the Pack Wars packs by buying the absolute minimum number of packs and assuming no duplicates. You could probably trade some people for ones you might be missing if you don’t want to spend that much. 

Ok, well is it must be a $200 card? Nope

$100? Nope but you’re getting warmer.

$75? No. I’m limited in time and word count, so I’ll cut to the chase for you. That card can be had, right now as we speak, 21 of them in fact, mostly for less than $2 each, including six for under $1.00.

What about those cool “combination” Young Gun parallels from earlier? Well, currently there are 68 Silver Foil Board parallels of 2015-16 Upper Deck Young Guns that can be purchased for $5 or less, with the vast majority of them under $2.

Same goes for the Silver and Speckled Rainbow parallels in the flagship product. At a minimum, a Silver parallel would cost $59.99 if you bought 10 packs (or a lot more if we are talking 2023-24 product) and each pack had the same card you could then take all 10 and combine them. Do that 10 times and you have the Speckled Rainbow parallel. Or spend a million hours trading for them.

Or – and hear me out on this – you could wait until 10 of them hit COMC, then 20, or even 40 and be able to pick up as many as you want for prices as low as 27 cents each, thus completing the race to the bottom.

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