2008-2009 McDonald’s Hockey Card Inserts

The 2008-2009 McDonald’s hockey card set is as usual a great sports card collectible. In a previous post I detailed the base set. Today, let’s look at the inserts.

First of all, the 6 card Checklist set features goalies from the 6 Canadian NHL hockey clubs. The card below features Calgary’s Mikka Kiprusoff. The other goalies featured include Carey Price of the Canadiens, the Senator’s Martin Gerber, Edmonton netminder Mathieu Garon, Vancouver’s Roberto Luongo and Leafs goalie Vesa Toskla.




Upper Deck suggests that you will pull a Checklist once out of every four packs.

The Superstar Spotlight series is a 14 card subset featuring stars such as Tampa’s Vincent Lecavalier, Joe Thornton of the Sharks and Red Wings’ dynamic forward Pavel Datsyuk.




According to company statistics on the back of the hockey card packages cards from this brightly colored and sharp looking insert set can be found on average once in every ten packs.

Unfortunately Upper Deck featured Jaromir Jagr who no longer plays in the NHL on the 12th card of this set.

The 10 card Profile subset features a wide array of NHL stars including Martin Brodeur, Dany Heatley and Roberto Luongo.




Of note, Mats Sundin, who has yet to decide whether he will skate in the NHL and with which team is a part of this hockey card subset.

The availability of the Profile cards is a ratio of one in fifteen packs.

The Speed Skater inserts are a 10 card set featuring some of the fastest skaters in the NHL. To accentuate the skating aspect of this set the cards are shaped like a hockey skate.

Cards from this set are a little more difficult to find as they are randomly packed one to every twenty five packages of hockey cards.

Some of the fastest skaters in the NHL are featured from the first card, the Lightning’s Martin St. Louis to Atlanta’s dynamic Ilya Kovlchuk, to the last card in the series Anaheim’s super fast defenseman Scott Niedermayer.



My favorite subset is also the most difficult to pull from a package. Cards from the “Clear Path to Greatness” subset are only found on average once in every 60 packs of hockey cards.

This set is going to be difficult to fill not only because of the 1:60 packs ratio but also because there are 14 cards in the set.

Featured stars include Henrik Zetterberg star forward with the Detroit Red Wings, superstar Alexander Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin one of the Penguins young stars.









These subsets are all well produced, featuring great colours, and Upper Deck’s usual photographic brilliance.

Postscript: There is another subset to this McDonald’s hockey card set but it is so scarce that I have yet to see a card from this set. McDonald’s have produced a limited edition gold parallel set. Each card is numbered out of 100.

The 2008-2009 Upper Deck McDonald’s hockey card set is a great set. Fun to collect and should be part of every hockey card collector’s collection.