It’s Crazy That These are Now Hobby Terms
In the latest episode of the Puck Junk Podcast, we talked at length about the 2025-26 Fleer Ultra Hockey card set, and how it is the first time in a long time that Fleer Ultra is back as a “physical card product.”
A physical card product. That just sounds WEIRD, doesn’t it? Like, what else would trading cards be…right?
We now live in the day and age of where we have to sometimes state specifically if the cards we are talking about are PHYSICAL or DIGITAL.
When the Topps Skate app (RIP) was still a thing – where people could buy and trade digital hockey cards – I had to remind Puck Junk readers and listeners that these were just digital cards. Pixels. Ones and zeroes. You could not have these cards mailed to you.
Over the past 10 years, Upper Deck’s e-Pack platform has been a major part of the hockey collecting hobby for many collectors, who can buy cards online, trade with other collectors, and then eventually have the cards shipped to them or sold on COMC.
But the rub is that some cards only exist as digital cards. For example, you buy a pack of Upper Deck Series Two, you get nine digital-only base cards and three physical insert cards which can later be flipped or shipped.
And as for the digital base cards? Sometimes, they only exist as JPEG images on your screen. But many times, they are referred to as fractional, meaning that you can combine multiple copies of the same digital card into a better, physical card.
Getting back to Fleer Ultra, the set was a digital card product sold on e-Pack from 2021-22 to 2024-25, with the ability for cards to be combined into physical cards. The last time Fleer Ultra was a physical card product was 2014-15.
This year’s Fleer Ultra is different, as there are hobby boxes of 2025-26 Fleer Ultra that contain actual, old-school, tangible, physical cards.
And then there’s the e-Pack version, where every card in the pack is fractional, but can be combined for “Speckle” parallel versions. Unlike MVP or Upper Deck Series One / Series Two / Extended Series, buying Fleer Ultra cards on e-Pack or COMC won’t help you complete your physical set.
So, what do you think of all of this? Are you going to collect Fleer Ultra hockey cards, either by buying physical hobby packs or digital e-Packs? Leave a reply, or hit me up on social media @puckjunk, and let me know what you think.
Note: This article is an updated version of an editorial that originally appeared in Volume 4 – Issue 19 of the Puck Junk Newsletter. For stories like these, plus news and updates about hockey cards and collectibles, subscribe to the newsletter here.
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