Gather round, friends, for it’s the most wonderful time of the year:

It’s O-Pee-Chee Release Time!

I am an unabashed O-Pee-Chee fan. If I could buy only one hockey product a year (and the way my budget is shaping up, it could well be the case), I would choose good ol’ cardboard O-Pee-Chee. I got back into the hobby by picking up old OPC cards that I remembered from my childhood, and when I decided to start buying new product, OPC was the first thing I looked at. O-Pee-Chee is hockey cards, to me. It’s cardboard. It’s big team sets. It’s players in the wrong jerseys and it’s stat blocks a mile long (well, sometimes it is). It’s a part of our my heritage.

O-Pee-Chee, under Upper Deck, is not a perfect product. I don’t think UD has one of those, and if they did, Jason and I wouldn’t have a reason to be here. I think there are a lot of things they could do better with the OPC brand, like really embrace the retro feel and make the set a tribute to the brand’s history. I don’t want Upper Deck to go full Topps Heritage with it and copy old designs, but I’d be all in if they made the Retro variant the actual base design and saved the flashier looks for O-Pee-Chee Platinum. Ditch the headshots on the cardbacks and add a player write-up and some colour — old OPC always had colour backs, even if it was monotone. And come on, if you’re going to use out of date photos of traded players, but list them under their current teams, then add a “traded to” blurb on the front as well!

But enough about what I want from O-Pee-Chee. Let’s take a look at what they have given us for the 2024-25 season. Or, click here if you don’t care what the numbers look like, and just want to get to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of it all.

The Breakdown

As it has been for quite a few years now, the base set is 600 cards. 1 to 500 are veterans with a couple checklists mixed in, while 501-599 are All-Stars and Marquee Rookies, with one final checklist to close things off. The base parallels are almost the same as they’ve been for the last two seasons, with one exception. The entire base set has Blue and Red Border parallels, 1:3 hobby packs and 1:18, respectively. Retail will bring us Yellow Border, 1:1 per blaster pack. There are also /1 Printing Plates if CMYK is your jam. This year sees the introduction of Orange Border parallels numbered to 25, which replace the Purple Border /49 of last year. The non-Blue/Red/Yellow colour has been different every year for some time now, as has the print numbering, so I guess Upper Deck just spins a colour wheel and uses a random number generator to decide how to fill the slot for each set.

Our All-Stars and Marquee Rookies are treated to additional numbered parallels in basic Rainbow Foil (/350), Black Rainbow (/100), Green Rainbow (/33), and the elusive Gold Rainbow (/1).

The evergreen Retro variants come one per pack, and as usual have both the Black Border (/100) and Blank Back (odds not announced, but are a hobby pack exclusive) parallels, as well as printing plates.

Finally, aside from the usual assortment of O-Pee-Chee inserts, there is also an interesting batch of base card variations this year. All of them are hobby pack exclusive, with no announced odds, and I can only imagine they are SSP or SSSP. I don’t know. Add as many Ss as you’d like— I’ve never seen them, but Upper Deck assures us they exist. This is what you are looking for:

No Helmet Photo Variations

20 cards.

• 6 Brady Tkachuk, Ottawa Senators
• 24 Connor McDavid, Edmonton Oilers
• 65 Timo Meier, New Jersey Devils
• 93 Drew Doughty, Los Angeles Kings
• 105 Alex Ovechkin, Washington Capitals
• 156 Connor Bedard, Chicago Blackhawks
• 159 Brandon Tanev, Seattle Kraken
• 168 Tim Stutzle, Ottawa Senators
• 170 Leon Draisaitl, Edmonton Oilers
• 186 Brent Burns, Carolina Hurricanes
• 248 Alex Tuch, Buffalo Sabres
• 261 Nazem Kadri, Calgary Flames
• 263 Jamie Benn, Dallas Stars
• 319 Tyler Toffoli, Winnipeg Jets
• 323 Jonathan Marchessault, Vegas Golden Knights
• 338 Steven Stamkos, Tampa Bay Lightning
• 378 Josh Morrissey, Winnipeg Jets
• 413 Anthony Duclair, New York Islanders
• 484 Erik Karlsson, Pittsburgh Penguins
• 496 David Pastrnak, Boston Bruins

Overall, the hobby box breakdown is pretty much unchanged this year compared to the last two seasons. Just replace your Purple Borders with Orange, and you know what to expect.

The Good

I’m not sure if I made this clear at the beginning: I love O-Pee-Chee. So, for me, there is a lot of good in this set. The Playing Cards set is a perennial favourite, and this year’s design is sure to be a crowd-pleaser. I’ve seen some complaints that Sydney Crosby isn’t an Ace this year but boo-hoo. There are only 4 Aces in a deck, and he’s been one for 8 of the last 9 years. I’m sure he’ll get over being demoted to King.

What’s not to love about the Retro set? It’s bold. It’s colourful. It looks like it stepped right out of the 1970s. Do I think it would be a bit better if they’d gone with a solid colour for the backdrop and done some colour matching for the border and team names? Yeah, I sure do! But since I was never consulted, I’m actually very happy with the way they turned out. I love the cardbacks too, even if they are still just black and white… or black and card stock. Seriously, look at old O-Pee-Chee cards. Colour everywhere. Look, I’m going to gripe about this until I get my way so you should probably just skip ahead.

I really like this season’s O-Pee-Chee Premier design. It’s a nice little pre-Platinum splash of foilboard, and has the added bonus of a /75 Diamond Rainbow parallel. The standard version comes 1:6 hobby packs, so you should be getting 3 per hobby box. I even like the little bevel/stroke line around the players. Unlike fuzzy halos that just look like lazy photo editing, this adds a bit of pop to the card. Premier is a hard insert to screw up, but somehow Upper Deck does it from time to time. I’m looking at you, Tall Boys!

The Bad

This base design is going to cause a lot of grading issues when it comes to centering. It’s not even that bad, to be honest. O-Pee-Chee has just been stuck in a “diagonal lines everywhere” rut for a while now, and I hope this is the culmination of it and we can move on to something new next year.

I’ve seen some YouTubers complain that the rookie crop has too much carry-over from last season, and that there are too many traded players in their old jerseys. I don’t have a horse in the race when it comes to the rookies, but as far as the old jerseys go: I love it. It’s part of the O-Pee-Chee charm. As I said above, the only thing missing is the “traded to” or “now with” note. I’d much rather see a player in his old team’s jersey than go back to the days of terrible airbrushing like you see with poor Ivan Boldirev up there.

The Ugly

The puzzle bounty chase is the first thing I’d get rid of with O-Pee-Chee if I had the power. But let’s say it was the only thing keeping OPC going, and the powers that be said I had to to keep it.

I’d sure as hell make the puzzle something more interesting to look at than just some blank cut out of a player.

This is the only chase card I can think of that I could pull from a box of O-Pee-Chee that would leave me disappointed.

Glo Pee-Chee is an unannounced insert that is kind of cool in concept, but I’m not really into the design. The cardbacks are just unpleasant looking, and the front looks like it was slapped together as an afterthought. When they did this insert back in 2016/17, at least they went with a marquee theme (get it? because they have Marquee Legends and Marquee Rookies? come on! it’s a whole thing with OPC! you’ll be a star, kid, with your name in lights!). A lone light bulb hanging from a cord doesn’t scream “superstar” to me.

The Wrap Up

I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I really like O-Pee-Chee Hockey. I’m glad Upper Deck respects the brand enough to keep it going, and I think they’d have to try pretty hard to screw it up for me to take a pass on it. Hobby boxes are currently selling for about $95 Canadian. You get 18 packs at 10 cards per, making it a pretty great value. It takes work to collect the entire checklist, especially if you want all of the inserts, but O-Pee-Chee is a product that can usually be picked up for cheap. I see previous years go on sale regularly, and you can pick up retail boxes even cheaper if you are looking to fill out your base set.

2024/25 O-Pee-Chee Hockey is available now at your friendly local trading card store.