Are you certain you are assigning a tuple of integers to self.player.vertices in update()? I find I need to be explicit.
Also, why are box_verts, vertlist, and newvertlist prepended with self? Do you really need those from other methods?
What is vertlist.update()? You define vertlist as a normal list, which doesn't have an update method. There seems to be a lot of pouring from one empty bucket into another going on.