PWHL Cards: This Week and the Future

Last week, Upper Deck released the 2024 PWHL Showcase collection, another run of electronic cards celebrating the season. Like the Game-Dated Moments set released earlier, these e-cards can be converted to physical cards at a later date. The set features 16 players from the league's six teams and includes two parallel sets that appear by chance in each pack. Two additional cards may be unlocked by collecting complete base and purple parallel sets. At $9.99 for a three-card pack, these cards are a little expensive, but for one of the first runs of PWHL cards, that doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

What does come as a surprise is that the Showcase cards are designed around photoshoot photos. Upper Deck’s earlier line that focused on star players was called 2024 PWHL Promo Inspirational Icons, and those cards had shots of the players on the ice during gameplay. While I wasn’t expecting media-day photo cards to come in the middle of the off-season, the Showcase line is still a new addition to Upper Deck’s PWHL portfolio in terms of style, and included some new players.

Cards for Alina Müller, Emma Maltais, Chloe Aurard, Emerance Maschmeyer, Brianne Jenner, Ann-Renée Desbiens, and Nicole Hensley represent Upper Deck’s first offerings for those players. Ella Shelton and Taylor Heise are appearing on their first base cards after being featured on Game-Dated Moments cards. Kristen Campbell has her first base card after her PWHL Awards card for winning Goaltender of the Year. Fans of these players, particularly the Europeans and first-year pro players who may not have had cards available before, can purchase the cards at the Upper Deck ePack website.

The other six cards in the set overlap players with the earlier Inspirational Icons set, which included only players signed before the inaugural draft. In total, Upper Deck has produced cards featuring only 23 of the over 160 players on game-day rosters this season. Including Wednesday’s new set, PWHL Boston has only seen cards for two players, Knight and Müller, and only two European players have been featured in Müller and Aurard.

While it’s understandable that the PWHL and Upper Deck want to create more products featuring players like Marie-Philip Poulin, Hilary Knight, and Kendall Coyne Schofield, it feels like a missed opportunity to expand the portfolio. Upper Deck has never released a run of women’s hockey cards amounting to anything like their NHL lines, where players beyond the biggest names are available. In the future, I hope they will feature some of the many other players fans of the league have been cheering for, and who they may wish to collect.

Here are some concepts for cards or collections for the 2024 PWHL season for players we haven’t seen featured yet.

Obvious misses

Team captains like Blayre Turnbull and Micah Zandee-Hart don't have cards yet, nor do top scorers like Laura Stacey, Megan Keller, and Alex Carpenter, or Goaltender of the Year finalists Aerin Frankel and Corinne Schroeder. If Upper Deck releases another 2024 line during the summer, these feel like slam-dunks.

Other notable performances

Outside of the MVP candidates, there were some extremely good players in the PWHL this season, and there were some impressive performances from players who may not have been predicted to finish so well. It's valuable to highlight players who did really well who aren't already household names, because they're the ones who could be faces of the league in years to come. Players like Hannah Miller, Elaine Chuli, Abby Boreen, Michela Cava, Kelly Pannek, Jessie Eldridge, Jade Downie-Landry, Kateřina Mrázová, and Daryl Watts deserve some attention.

Rookie cards

A classic category that women's hockey sorely needs. Top players like Heise, Müller, and Maltais have gotten cards, but they haven't been RCs. That designation gives a different flair and value to a card. There's something special about getting a rookie card for a player and then getting to watch them progress through their career. In addition to the players whose names are already in the conversation, we need RCs for players with big futures like Maureen Murphy, Gabbie Hughes, Emma Söderberg, Mariah Keopple, and Maggie Connors.

Fan favorites

How do we not have a Carly Jackson hockey card yet? The people want to know. The people, I suspect, would also love to get cards for players like Lexie Adzija and Akane Shiga, among others.

Diversity in hockey

As a community, we like to celebrate the diversity that exists in hockey and highlight it. PWHL players have said 'if you can see it, you can be it' in league promotional videos this season. I would love to see cards highlighting Black, Indigenous, Jewish, and Asian players like Victoria Bach, Kelly Babstock, Abbey Levy, Jocelyne Larocque, Brooke Stacey, Samantha Cogan, Nikki Nightengale, Cami Kronish, and Leah Lum.

Trade cards

Eight active players were traded in the league's first season. It would be so fun to have two-team cards for players like Sophie Jaques, Susanna Tapani, Amanda Boulier, and Tereza Vanišová, pictured wearing jerseys from each of their teams.

Europeans

With the 2024 draft class pulling several players from the SDHL and other professional leagues, we will hopefully get cards for players from outside North America sooner rather than later. But the PWHL could highlight the national diversity in the league's inaugural season, including players like Sandra Abstreiter, Aneta Tejralová, Fanni Garát-Gasparics, Johanna Fällman, and Theresa Schafzahl.

NHL relations

Upper Deck and Tim Horton's partnered up with the NHL and the NHLPA on a ‘Duos’ run earlier this year, cards featuring two players. These mostly included men's players, but they also included a number of women's players in their PWHPA jerseys. The only NHL/'PWHL' crossover card was Sarah Nurse and her cousin Darnell Nurse, who plays for the Edmonton Oilers. There could be a whole set of such crossover duos with players from the inaugural season. It would be pretty fun to see paired cards for Sophia Kunin and her husband Luke (San Jose Sharks), Jesse Compher and her brother JT (Detroit Red Wings), and Kennedy Marchment and her cousin Mason (Dallas Stars). With two more players with siblings in the NHL coming into the league next season, this could be a way to introduce NHL card collectors to the PWHL side.

NCAA standouts

College sports fans is maybe the most direct demographic to try and bring into the PWHL. Cards for former Patty Kazmaier winners Loren Gabel, Élizabeth Giguère, and Daryl Watts, and former NCAA All-Americans Ashton Bell, Jaime Bourbonnais, Hannah Brandt, and Jill Saulnier may appeal to that audience.

Defenders

It feels bad that this has to be a category, but only three of Upper Deck’s 23 cards featuring PWHL players feature defenders right now. Where is the love for Renata Fast, Kaleigh Fratkin, Mellissa Channell, Kali Flanagan, Dominika Lásková, and Jincy Roese?

The Drama

Look, sports fans love drama, and women's sports fans may love it a little extra. Why not capitalize on the storylines? I want to see a Mikyla Grant-Mentis two-jersey card that shows her in Ottawa red and Montréal maroon. I want to see a Jillian Dempsey in Montréal card and a Jamie Lee Rattray in Boston card. Is it petty? Yes. Do I feel any shame about it? No.

Retiring players

This isn’t an established genre of hockey cards, but that’s because they’ve been making men’s hockey cards for what feels like forever. There are players hanging up the skates after the 2024 season who I want to see PWHL cards for: Erica Howe, Amanda Leveille, Mélodie Daoust, Brittany Howard, Jess Healey, Brittyn Fleming, and Becca Gilmore. We may learn of more players who are calling it a career by the end of the summer, and it would be pretty meaningful if they were able to get cards to commemorate the end of their pro careers.

Players who aren’t retiring yet

Look, I just don't want to see players like Madison Packer, Gigi Marvin, or Lee Stecklein retire without seeing their faces on PWHL cards. There are other storied players as well who we may miss out on if Upper Deck doesn’t extend their offerings in the next few years. 

Literally a bunch of other great players

I haven't even mentioned people like Maddie Rooney, Hayley Scamurra, Natalie Buchbinder, Kristin O'Neill, Taylor Girard, Emma Woods, or Denisa Křížová. 

If this has felt like a really long list, that's because it is! There are so many stories to tell in women's hockey. Things like hockey cards, jerseys with the players' names on them, pucks that fans get autographed after the game, they're all physical reminders of the living history that we watch play out in front of us.

While some of these players may have cards from their play in other leagues or on national teams, the narrative of the PWHL has its own weight and deserves its own record. There is so much potential in Upper Deck's offerings to provide those connections between fans and this league. I hope we see many exciting expansions for the Upper Deck-PWHL partnership in the future.