What's that you say? You have thousands, possibly millions of 1990-91 Upper Deck cards and you don't remember this one. That's because it didn't exist (not to mention Iginla didn't have a card until his '94 SP draft pick card). This is a sample from the soon to be released 2010-11 Upper Deck Series I Hockey.
Scheduled for November, Upper Deck is planning thier unveiling of thier flagship hockey set, celebrating 20 years in the making. This is the design Upper Deck used to launch themselves into the hockey card market back then and they are bringing it back. These will be featured as a base parallel set randomly inserted into packs at about 1/4 packs. In the world of retro themed sets, I can think of a lot worse of a product to model these after. In other words, for nostalgia sake, I like them.
The base cards will look very similar to their baseball counterparts, with the black & white photo adorning the bottom border of the card. They typical full bleed action shots that we have all become accustomed to will also be there. Other insert sets look to include a Clear Cut Lineage Set which appear to be acetate or at least "see through" and feature three players from a teams history and are serial numbered, Clear Cut Champions which look to be "diecut" around a Stanley Cup shape and numbered, the standard run-of-the-mill UD Jersey set that everyone is learning to despise, and the ever-popular Young Guns which should fall about 6 per hobby box.
Beckett has the release story over on their blog if anyone wants to check it out. I am not a product previewer by any means but when I saw this, with the exception of their GU design, it got me excited to see the puck drop again (I know it has only been about a month but I'm going through withdrawal).
Those 90-91 parallels look AWESOME! If they were one per pack I'd probably buy a case of this stuff, but at 1:4 I'll likely stay away. Wasn't a big fan of the 2010 UD Baseball base design. Was hoping they'd go a different direction with hockey instead of reusing the baseball design like they do every year.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think having a monopoly on the NHL card market maybe they'd put just a little bit of effort into a new design for their flagship hockey cards every year, but no...
I am still anxiously awaiting any product peeks at what Panini may unleash on us.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, the "retro" Upper Deck cards should be 1 per pack.
ReplyDeleteWho ever thought we'd live to see the phrase "retro Upper Deck cards"?
Guess that makes us all officially old now.
So is UD going to continue with a series 1 AND 2? I was guessing with the limited number of products they could make that they were going to just combine the two sets into one. Happy if they continue with 2 because I like having the updates due to trades, etc. With the retro set, makes you wonder if OPC will not have a retro set then.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen a recent release calendar for UD in a while but the last I checked, Series I and II were both on there, as well as OPC. I can't really see them pulling the parallel set from the OPC release. That has been a very popular set to chase for many collectors.
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as us being old...well, yeah. I got nothing. I guess we are old.
I don't know how I feel about the retro set; if they use the original sort of card stock, can dig it; if they use thick, glossy stock, not so much.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think about that, Casey. That is a good point.
ReplyDelete