Opening and sorting stickers is a lot of work.
It isn’t necessarily hard work, but it is time-consuming work.
For my second box of 2022-23 Topps Hockey Stickers, I streamlined opening the packs. Normally, I would open a pack, look through the stickers, and sort them by 100s. This time, I would open the pack and remove the stickers, but just put it in a pile until I opened 10 packs. Then, I’d thumb through the stickers and sort them. This seemed to make opening and sorting the stickers go much faster. With a pack of cards, I want to savor the moment, look at each card — and hopefully get a hit. With stickers, there are no “hits” and you don’t get anything rare; just four paper stickers and one foil sticker.
One of the packs was put into the box sideways. This caused some of the stickers to “curl,” but fortunately they were easy to flatten out. If they were creased, I’d be annoyed.
Another pack was — gasp! — missing a sticker.
Here’s my breakdown of my second box of 2022-23 Topps Hockey Stickers.
What I Got in My 2nd Box
199 regular stickers. Yes, you read that right. One of my packs was short one paper sticker, so my box had 199 regular stickers. Boo! Fortunately, it was a paper sticker and not one of the foil stickers, which you get one per pack.
50 foil stickers; 1 was a double of another sticker in the same box.
That’s 248 unique stickers in my box, with one paper sticker missing and one foil sticker being a double.
Breakdowns by 100s
It’s always annoying when you buy a box of cards or stickers and a disproportionate amount are within a certain range. I remember when I opened 530 packs of 1995-96 Panini Hockey stickers and got a ton of stickers from 1-100, and then not as many from 101-200. It was frustrating. So, this is the sort of thing I like to keep track of, at least with sticker sets.
1-99
30 regular stickers
13 foil stickers
= 43 stickers / 17.3% of the box
100-199
28 regular stickers
7 foil stickers
= 35 stickers / 14.0% of the box
200-299
25 regular stickers
9 foil stickers
= 34 stickers / 13.7% of the box
300-399
27 paper stickers
4 foil stickers
= 31 stickers / 12.4% of the box
400-499
27 paper stickers
7 foil stickers
= 34 stickers / 13.7% of the box
500-599
34 paper stickers
6 foil sticker
= 40 stickers / 16.0% of the box
600-679
28 paper stickers
4 foil stickers
= 32 stickers / 12.9% of the box
This time, I got a few more stickers from 1-99, but overall it was a pretty even distribution.
So, What Stickers Did I Actually Need?
Out of 248 unique stickers — remember, I was missing a paper sticker and one foil sticker was a double — I actually needed 136 of the paper stickers and 47 of the foil stickers. (Only 63 paper stickers and 2 foil stickers were duplicates of what I got in my first box of 2022-23 Topps Hockey Stickers.) That means that 73% of this box were not doubles of my first box, which I think is great. (Compare this to my second box of Topps Hockey Stickers from 2020-21, where 75% of the stickers were identical from my first box that season. FYI, I was too lazy to post my sticker box break results from 2021-22, so I don’t remember if collation was good or bad last year.)
After two boxes of 2022-23 Topps Hockey Stickers, I have 433 out of 679 stickers, which is about 63.7% of the set. I know my third box will not be as helpful as this one — the more stickers you have, the more likely you are to get doubles — but overall, I think the collation of Topps Hockey Stickers this year has been great so far.
While my second box of 2022-23 Topps Hockey Stickers was very good overall, I have to take a half a puck off for the missing sticker and the aforementioned quality control issue. Otherwise, this has been a very positive collecting experience overall. Now, on to opening and sorting that third box of stickers. Check back next week for my third and final box break of 2022-23 Topps Hockey Stickers.
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