Heading into 2010, I’d venture to guess that 99 percent of baseball card collectors knew that there would be only one official producer of Major League Baseball cards. And we all knew that Upper Deck was going to go ahead with products of their own, even without the blessing of The Man. It was something we as a collecting community were anxious to see. What would these cards look like? Would they look like many of the other unlicensed cards with logos and team names Photoshopped out? Would Upper Deck find a new way to do things? Well, Upper Deck certainly didn’t help the collecting world when it decided to release product information WITHOUT images. And so we were left in the dark. If we wanted to know what the cards would look like, we were going to have to buy some to figure it out.
And so there I was on Tuesday after having received an e-mail from my local card shop about the Upper Deck Series One arrival. I made it there before they even opened the first box. I didn’t want to go overboard, I knew the packs would run somewhere between $5 and $6 because of the number of cards per pack, so I decided before hand that I would buy three packs figuring that would get me 60 cards with a shot at one of the three hits in the box.
I’ll say this up front, my packs sucked. I am a Red Sox collector and there was not a single BoSox card to find in the packs. There also were no hits and the best cards, in my opinion, were base cards of Evan Longoria, Matt Weiters and cards of Yankee Stadium and Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, where I have attended more than 30 games during my life.
Check out the small picture of Longoria. Curious George?
I digress. What I did notice though is the photographs that Upper Deck used on these unlicensed cards — it seems like the majority of them were of the player following through on their throw, swing or pitch. See for yourself.
I initially liked the photos, but after thumbing through 60 cards and noticing that many of them look alike, it started to piss me off a bit.
Speaking of pissing me off, what the eff is up with this Biography insert set? Are we REALLY seeing a redux of Documents? And these Portrait cards are an uglier version of an already ugly design we saw in 2005 Origins. Gah!
And lastly, I will say I was quite amused with Upper Deck Star Rookie Cards. Check out the Rookie Card Logo. Seems like a big Eff You to MLBP.
cardboardicons.com 