It has now been nearly 5 months since Upper Deck surprised the hobby world with the introduction of its new electronic collecting platform: the e-Packs. If you are not already familiar with this platform, I invite you to read the very informative article Richard McAdam wrote about it just after the launch, you can find it here: https://www.sportscardforum.com/threa...roduces-e-Pack .

I will admit that I wasn't sure about this new way of collecting when it first came out but after giving it a fair try, I am, unfortunately if you ask my wallet, hooked. Why? Well, you know how sometime you are feeling rough and you don't fancy going out but you could do with some cheering up? When such a thing occurs, you can now buy yourself some packs or a box right from the comfort of your house. Or remember how long it can be when you bust wax to scan or take a picture of each hit and add it either to your inventory on SCF or to your Photobucket account so that people can browse what you have? With e-Packs that's a thing of the past, the hits are on the screen, you already have pictures of them all and they are instantly added to your collection. If someone wants to trade with you they can see right away what you have available and the platform is pretty user friendly. Gone are the traditional days where a trade started with a private message stating your interest in the other party's card (it's a sign of the times that traditional trades for me are not even when we used to swap cards during recess at school anymore) now, on e-Pack, you just browse someone's collection add the cards you are interested in and select the ones you are willing to part from, press submit and there it is, a trade proposal! The platform is rather busy on weekends and you normally get a reply within hours if not minutes of making the offer. It's also worth saying that trade offers are valid for 24 hours. After this deadline, the offer expires and is no longer valid.


What surprised me the most about this new platform though is that it kind of managed to make me a set collector again to my own amazement. Let's be honest, most of us, when opening boxes only care for the hits but with e-Packs, if you collect 10 copies of a base card, you get to upgrade it to a foil parallel. No, I don't think I will build the whole foil set but I'll admit that I am currently in the process of “foiling” up all of my Canadiens base cards. So I spent a significant amount of time this weekend making small base for base trades. I honestly cannot remember the last time I did a base trade online.I even came across some friends I made on SCF on there, rather unsurprisingly, a lot of people on the e-Pack site have got the same user name as they do on SCF. With the postage fees it's just not really worth it most of the time but when no physical cards are switching hands, it's another story. Of course there will be postage fees involved when/if you decide to have your online cards physically sent to you, but if you are patient enough, you can wait so that it's really worth it to have them shipped. Furthermore, it took me a mere 12 hours to build the whole of Upper Deck Series 2 Rookie Portraits set on there which is much faster than it took me to build the Series 1 Portraits set using both SCF and various Facebook groups.

I'm also very impressed with how intuitive the interface is, it seriously is like child play. It should take you about a couple of seconds to work out how to make trade offers, how to set your wish list and how to mark cards “not for trade” by just locking them. Just like on SCF and eBay you can also leave feedback on the offers you've received. The more you use the e-Pack platform, the more achievements you'll unlock. While I do understand why some are not very keen on this initiative by Upper Deck (mainly shop owners and people who do not see the need for it), as a collector who lived for over 8 years in England I can confirm that I would have killed for something like this back then. It's very easy for those of us who live in North America to have access to hobby shops, card shows and the likes but it's not the same for everyone everywhere. And come to think of it, it's even useful for those of us who do have brick and mortar stores nearby! While I can't say I'll stop physically ripping wax anytime soon (got to love the feeling you get when you rip a pack open and the anticipation when you slowly slide a card to reveal the next one), I'm happy that there is now a convenient way for me to scratch that hitch anytime and anywhere. Besides, who are we to stand in the way of progress?