Upper Deck Releases New Hockey Coins

Upper Deck has released a new hockey collectible that will cost some serious…coin. On Monday evening at the Hockey Hall of Fame, the trading card company announced the launch of the Grandeur Hockey Coin Collection, a series of limited-edition coins minted in silver and gold. The coins are available for purchase starting on April 5 and sell for $100 to $500. 

“I look at this as a game-changing product line, similar to what we did in 1989 with trading cards,” said Jason Masherah, president of Upper Deck, in an interview with Puck Junk. “Nobody has ever blind-packed precious metal coins before.”

The Grandeur Hockey Coin collection features portraits of 20 different players — 18 current NHL stars and two retired legends — and is sold both on Upper Deck’s E-Pack platform and by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), who partnered with Upper Deck in the development of the Grandeur Coin Collection. Coins purchased on E-Pack can be traded with other E-Pack users for coins or cards on the platform. 

Like trading cards, these coins are sold “blind-bagged,” meaning that consumers won’t know which coin they get until they open the packaging. A pack with one coin costs $100, while a collector’s box with four coins costs $499 and guarantees one of the three rarer coin types. Also included is a display that holds 20 coins. 

“Obviously, the trading card collector is going to be very familiar with this delivery system,” said Masherah. But our main target, honestly, is the coin collector and the general sports fan who just wants a really cool collectible of their favorite player.” 

Each of the 20 coins produced will be minted in three different silver finishes:

Colored – Numbered to 5,000 copies

High-Relief Silver – Numbered to 1,000 copies

Silver-Frosted – Numbered to 500 copies

Finally, there are also a super-rare, 24-karat gold versions of the coins.

Gold – Numbered to 100 copies.

Silver coins weigh 1 oz. each, while the gold coins weigh 1/4 oz. 

The complete checklist is as follows:

Patrice Bergeron – Boston
Dustin Byfuglien – Winnipeg
Sidney Crosby – Pittsburgh
Jack Eichel – Buffalo
Wayne Gretzky – Edmonton
Jaromir Jagr – Florida
Patrick Kane – Chicago
Dylan Larkin – Detroit
Henrik Lundqvist – New York
Erik Karlsson – Ottawa
Connor McDavid – Edmonton
Sean Monahan – Calgary
William Nylander – Toronto
Alex Ovechkin – Washington
Carey Price – Montreal
Patrick Roy – Montreal
Daniel Sedin – Vancouver
Vladimir Tarasenko – St. Louis
John Tavares – Brooklyn
Jonathan Toews – Chicago

Note that team names aren’t listed because the Grandeur Hockey Coin Collection, while licensed by the NHL Players Association, is not involved with the NHL in any way. Instead of a team logo, the coins use an image of a landmark from the city that the player plays in, such as the World Trade Center on Henrik Lundqvist’s coin or Niagara Falls on Jack Eichel’s coin. 

The basic Grandeur hockey coins have colored backgrounds and are limited to 5,000 copies each. [Click for a high-resolution image]
Grandeur Hockey coins have a holographic Upper Deck anti-counterfeit logo embedded in them — a practice the company has done since the launch of their inaugural baseball card set in 1989. The coins are also serial-numbered on the front. 

For more information, visit HockeyCoins.com. To purchase Grandeur Hockey Coins, visit Upper Deck E-Pack or CIBC.com/UpperDeck

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Author: Sal Barry

Sal Barry is the editor and webmaster of Puck Junk. He is a freelance hockey writer, college professor and terrible hockey player. Follow him on Twitter @puckjunk

8 thoughts on “Upper Deck Releases New Hockey Coins”

  1. A 1/4oz of gold is currently going for $313, and an oz of silver is going for $19. Soooo, there’s the profit being made by Upper Deck.

  2. These are NOT coins. Coins are minted by countries. At best, these are medallions, and privately produced medallions at that, no different than the junk produced by The Franklin Mint, all through the ’70s and ’80s. Value? Whatever the melt value is of the metal in question. Collectible? Sure, but definitely not a great investment.

    1. You might want to read up on things before incorrectly commenting on what “you believe to be true”.. Pay particular to the Upper deck site, where it tells you they are legal tender in the Cook Islands. This is public information readily available.

  3. The Cook Islands? It’s amazing how some countries will prostitute their mints to produce junk for private interests. Tell me, before these came out, did you ever even hear of The Cook Islands? I doubt it.

    1. Personally, to be honest, I was unsure, but I thought I heard of it because of an internet top level domain name. After verification, I was right: “.ck is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Cook Islands.”. So for some reason, a lot of geeks/tech-savvy persons probably have heard of The Cook Islands in some way because of this particular detail. 😉 If it was not of this, I would probably never have heard of this “country”, except if I was training for Jeopardy, and I will probably never do this. 😉

      Still, that is interesting that they put some effort so it is an official coin of a country. Weird in some way, but interesting nonetheless!

  4. I remember when I was a kid, at the beginning of the 90s (yeah at the beginning of the craze of hockey cards!), there was some kind of medallions made of some star players and I saved to get Patrick Roy’s one. I think it was made of silver and it was kind of neat-o. Probably costed me around 50-75$ CAD for it, which was a lot for a kid back then. Not sure if they hold any value or what, but it is part of my collector childhood memory and I still got it somewhere! 😉

    I would personally be quite interested in a Crosby set for my Crosby collection and maybe some special serial number like the 1st ones of each.

    P.S., With their experience with the card collectors that search packs, I guess Upper Deck already thought of balancing the weight in the pack so people cannot guess if they get a more desirable and limited gold in their pack. I hope they also thought of avoiding specific metal detection without opening the pack (if that is possible). 😉

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