Last month, I purchased two full boxes of 2018-19 Panini NHL Stickers. My first box had quite a few foil stickers, and very few duplicates. So I was excited to open the second box of Panini stickers, and hoped that the collation would be as good as the first box.
About 2018-19 Panini NHL Stickers
A box has 50 packs, and each pack has five stickers, for a total of 250 stickers. The full set has 575 stickers, which means you could buy two full boxes with perfect collation — that is, no doubles in either box — and will still be 75 stickers short.
What I Got in My 2nd Box
202 paper stickers; five were doubles.
48 foil stickers; zero were doubles.
Once again, the collation on 2018-19 Panini NHL Stickers was superb. Only five of the 250 stickers were doubles; that’s only 2%! Foil stickers came just about a little less than one per pack, with some packs having two foil stickers and other packs having no foil stickers.
Breakdown by 100s for my 2nd Box
Here is the breakdown of the stickers by groupings of 100.
0-99
31 paper stickers
13 foil stickers
= 44 stickers total
101-199
39 paper stickers (1 was a double)
10 foil stickers
= 49 stickers total
200-299
26 paper stickers
6 foil stickers
= 32 stickers total
300-399
40 paper stickers (two were doubles)
10 foil stickers
= 50 stickers total
400-499
33 paper stickers
8 foil stickers
= 41 stickers total
500-599
33 paper stickers (two were doubles)
1 foil sticker
= 34 stickers total
This box had a pretty even distribution of stickers by each grouping, though quite a few less stickers in the 200s. That’s fine by me, because my first box had more stickers in the 200s than any other grouping.
How Many Did I Need/Not Need?
Out of 250 stickers, five of them were doubles; that is, they were already found in the same box, so that is five stickers that I did not need. But here is where this box break got really good. Of the 197 paper stickers found in this box, I needed 188 of them. And of the 48 foil stickers that I got, I needed all 48 of them. So, my first box gave me 246 stickers that I needed, and this box gave me another 236 stickers. That is awesome!
Collation has been so bad with Panini stickers over the past three decades that if I got 125 stickers that I needed in my second box, I would have considered that a success. Thus, getting 236 stickers that I needed (and 14 doubles) is better than I could have even imagined. I hope that this is not a one-off, but an improvement that Panini made in its collation process for this year and going forward.
I understand that it is highly unlikely to open two boxes of Panini stickers and expect to get only 18 doubles between the two boxes, but the fact that I got very few doubles in the very same box makes this year’s Panini set worth building. Yes, building this set is expensive, but still far less expensive than building a hockey card set with all of the short prints. ■
Follow Sal Barry on Twitter @PuckJunk.
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