I’ve been experimenting with a new way to visualize ePack data to see if we can spot market inefficiencies before they become obvious. Instead of just looking at the "Buy Now" price, I wanted to map the supply chain. specifically, how many cards are locked in collections vs how many are flooding the marketplace.
I used the new 2025-26 Upper Deck Rookie Debut set as the test case. It’s an ePack exclusive release (27-card checklist, 3 cards per pack) that dropped recently, making it the perfect closed ecosystem to analyze.
I pulled the live population volumes from their marketplace and built this dashboard to track "Market Fluidity." Here is what the data says.
The Methodology: Calculating the Print Run
Since Upper Deck doesn’t publish total print runs for unnumbered base cards, we have to reverse-engineer it using the odds and serial numbered print runs.
We know that there are 27 players in the checklist and that 5 of the 6 inserts are serial numbered, with the 6th (“It’s Your Time!”) being assigned 1:3 odds. Since the total print volume of the serial numbered inserts would make up the remaining 2:3 insert odds, we can determine the total volume of the print of the “It’s Your Time!” insert.
The base set has 2:1 odds, so to get to the total base set print volume, we can take the total insert volume and double it.
The Insights: Base vs. Gold Divergence
The dashboard view compares the Actual Market Supply (blue bars) against an "Expected Supply" curve (vertical grey lines). The results are wildly different for low vs. high-end cards.
Bullish on Base: The Base cards are surprisingly scarce. Only 69.8% are currently fluid in the marketplace, which is well below the ~85% expected for a new ePack release. This means collectors are actually locking the base rookies rather than flooding the market.
Bearish on Gold: The Gold Parallels (/49) are flooding the market. You would expect a /49 to be vaulted immediately, but 55.7% of the entire print run is currently listed for trade. This is higher than the expected rate (~50%), suggesting that people are flipping the "hits" to fund their next pack or to chase achievements.
TL;DR: The market is "Scarcity Protected" on the low end but "Oversupplied" on the high end. If you are buying, the Base cards might hold value better than you think, but there are way more Gold inserts available than there should be.
