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Product Review: 2009 Upper Deck Draft Edition Football

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This year, we have had two duds as our 1 and 2 hitters for the football card season schedule. UD Draft, Upper Deck’s first product of the year, comes out this week and many people have been waiting what the product has to offer. 5 autos per box, most of them on card, and a good design to boot for the masher in the 3 hole. Most of the time, being late to the party is a bad thing, unless the first two guests are Bowman Draft and Prestige. The only thing I could forsee being a problem is the Bowman brand being attached to the Topps product, as that will always draw more people. Either way, I am so glad my favorite part of the card year is coming up. Im going to need it.

Design/Creativity

Last year the design made Topps Rookie Progression seem like it was done on MS Paint, but that wasn’t hard. This year the design is much improved (nice job Lindsey), and I even like the horizontal orientation with the slanty auto placement. It doesn’t interfere with the player’s picture, and even without the auto, the design looks complete – unlike many of the cards in Prestige. The granite look seems to fit well, and the parallels seem to blend better than they did last year.

The only complaint is a lack of NFL presence on the cards, as the college logo makes me think that UD put this set together a long, long time ago. Obviously, to get the signatures on card, you need to do that, so Im not too put up about it considering that the set’s checklist looks about right.Also, UD used the same RC Logo on the card as last year, which I hate, and it looks completely unnecessary on this design. There is no reason for any company to use a stupid logo to signify a rookie card anymore, especially with the amount of information people can get from the internet. I remember it was an issue in baseball because the league forces it to be on the card, due to the confusion over the number of sets. Really, if you need an outdated logo to tell you which card is THE rookie card, you need to learn how to use google more effectively.

Lastly, you can tell this set is put out by UD and that is a good thing. Prestige and Bowman lacked the pizzazz of a well designed set, looking thrown together at the last minute, while this looks themed and nicely put together. Shows you what preparation can do for you, as Prestige seemed like they just threw some twists on last year. This set looks new and fresh (again, nice job Lindsey), and I would choose this over the other two any day. Even the pictures they chose for the cards look intimidating and fit well.

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Relic Cards

This set does not have any relic cards as far as I know.

N/A

Autograph Cards

I really, really like the autographs in this set, as they use a concept that you don’t usually see in the placement of the sigs. Normally I would say that you shouldn’t break something that aint broken, but they look quite good. As the first on card offering of the year, I put this down as a win for UD in terms of the looks of the cards with the hard signed sigs. They just look so much better than throwing a sticker on a pre-designed spot for the autograph to go. This gives players more room to sign, and you can see where it benefitted players like Stafford and Moreno who have loopy and large autos.

The duals fit the theme of the set well, and the alumni association cards are a college team collector’s wet dream. It seemed as though UD knew the type of collectors that would value this set, and included elements of what they want in a set of this type. Considering that no other set has a Stafford and Moreno dual, or anything close to it, you have to give props to UD for beating them to the punch with such cool looking cards.

The problem I see is that the duals seem to be stickers, which is understandable considering the time needed to get two college players to sign a card during the end of the season. I didn’t get to see any of the Vet sigs during the few boxes I saw broken in Vegas, but I assume they will be stickers too. If not, then this product will be THAT much better.

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Value To The Collector

These sets never hold their value, and for good reason. College cards are a waste of space for anyone BUT the college collectors, who are a ridiculously small portion of the hobby. Stupid people always come on here and try to say that Press Poop and Sage are good sets for those type of people and I have said on numerous occasions that I agree. They must miss that for anyone who doesn’t care that Kenny Britt played for Rutgers, all of this is just a placeholder until the post premiere sets. Personally, I would like to see them shift the card season back a while, even though it would mean more time I would have to wait without cards. Offer post-premiere sets with ELEMENTS of this stuff instead of getting it out there just to get it out there.

I would expect that once an NFL based UD set comes out with the players in their new uniforms, this set will drop 10-20% in value. Once the season gets to SPA, this stuff will be at 40 dollars a box. At 85 dollars for a box, the price delivers ten fold over Bowman Draft’s 2 autos for 110, and Prestige’s 1-2 for 120. That means that at least if you buy this out of boredom, you will get something out of it. Having 5 autos a box never a bad thing.

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Overall Impressions

If I had the past three products to choose from for the entire year, I would buy 100 boxes of draft before the thought even entered my mind to buy another early 2009 product, but I would still choose to wait for a post premiere product in any other situation. UD did better than I thought they would with this set, so a kudos is due on that. However, when a product gets delayed by as much as draft did, people get frustrated, especially when there is nothing else to buy. Hopefully the sets continue to be new and fresh, something that would make
me happier than I could ever imagine in such a boring plethora of bad products.

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2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)

1. 2009 UD Draft Edition (3/5 GELLMANS)
2(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
2(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)

Product Review: 2009 Bowman Draft Picks Football

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Bowman Draft has hit stores today and I was hoping that it would take Playoff Prestige and blow it out of the water. I went to the shop by my house over lunch today to watch some of the people there who love to bust new wax, and I must say their reviews and mine were quite less than extraordinary. With Jumbo boxes, you do get quite a few parallels per pack, but the overall aura of the product seems to be very, VERY low end.

Design/Creativity

I like the design of the base cards for the set, and the auto cards arent bad either. The 2 or 3 insert sets look pretty good for what they are, but that’s pretty much all there is. The first base parallel is “Orange” and it looks awfully weird with most of the pictures they used. As a color, you really gotta stick with gold and silver, as otherwise there are going to be some major color clashes.

The auto manupatches look SOOOOO much better than the last time they had this crap, think of the letter ones from finest rather than the disguting vomit that was Lettermen, and you have your ones from this. The college logo patches in this set have sticker autos, and on the white background they don’t look too bad. I saw Donald Brown and Clay Matthews, not bad in terms of looks.

I cant tell you how disappointed I am that there are no chrome parallels in this stuff, as I cant see a reason not to do it. The guys will be in NFL unis for the regular chrome, so why not give us chrome college unis while we wait. If there was nothing else that was done to this set, adding chrome would have made it 10x better. Otherwise, paying $110 a box for gloss base cards of players in their college unis is highway robbery.

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Relic Cards

There are no relic cards in this set as far as I know.

N/A

Autograph Cards

Ill tell you, I had no idea that the base autograph cards in this set were on card. That improves these by about a million percent for that reason alone. At least when you get an auto, you know you wont have to put up with those awful stickers. The college logo cards are stickers, but as I said before the stickers on the white background look so much better than normal.

The auto cards also have normal Bowman parallels, going all the way down to the platinum 1/1s, but just think about how amazing these would be in chrome. That much better, right?

As for the checklist, the list goes VERY deep, and the group A autos are at astronomical odds. Mainly, if you are going to pull an auto, it is going to be Ian Johnson or the like. Granted, if you manage to pull Stafford, Moreno, or someone similar, you will be rolling in dough. So, a double edged sword there.

Mainly, these autos leave quite a bit to be desired, but at least are better than the normal expectations for Topps Rookie Progression and the other visual abortions Topps has had in this slot. It wasn’t too hard to do better than Rookie Progression, but this did do better, thank god. Who will be this year’s De’cody Fagg? Im hoping to find out soon.

Also, there is not a single veteran autograph in this set, unlike Prestige and UD Draft, so you are definitely not going to get anything out of your hits unless you hit a biggie at 1:900+ packs.

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Value To The Collector

If these boxes cost 50 bucks for the jumbos and 30 for hobby (which they will later this year), I would say this is such a better deal. At a gross $110 fucking dollars for 2 autos and a bunch of penny base cards, you are going to go home crying if you buy these boxes. I cannot believe anyone would even think of buying a box of this product, let alone paying the price tag on a pack for 10 dollars at this point in the season. Even the top of the top rookie PARALLELS wont break 5 dollars, and your autos wont break 10 TOGETHER unless you are balls to the walls lucky.

If it were me, I would wait a week, spend 30 dollars less, and buy UD draft for the 5 autos you get out of that box. At least then you have a shot at some veteran autographs, dual autographs, and a MUCH better shot at the top guys. This is as close to goddamn insanity prices as you are going to get. Topps made a huge fucking blunder here, I feel bad for anyone that is enough of a sucker to buy in.

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Overall Impressions

Although the set looks nice in pictures, buy the cheap ass singles rather than even thinking about a box. You can go on ebay and probably buy the whole freaking thing for 10 bucks, some 100 dollars off the box price if you are a set collector with Bowman Draft aspirations. Stay about as far away from this on your shop’s shelves as you can, that is until about 70 dollars falls off the price tag. Come October, Blowout will practically be giving these fuckers away, so watch out for that instead of busting your wallet. Need more proof? SPA, one of the best and most valuable sets of the year costs 120 dollars for a box, this costs 110 and you get NOTHING out of it. Barf and a half.

Average Rating:

2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)

1(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
1(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)

Designing A Winner

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I have said on many occasions that the design of the card can make or break a product, more-so to me than any other element of the card. To me, it could be a 1/1 NFL logo Adrian Peterson autograph, and I would pass if it looked like a piece of shit. Personally, I think card design has become a lost art, and that companies, especially Topps, have focused more on how they will pack more autos into a set than more well designed cards.

Look at Triple Threads, my all time most hated product. It is packed with cards literally packed with jerseys and autos, and I think it is the worst possible thing you can invest in. I have not bought a single Triple Threads single in the last few years, and most of it stems from the ridiculous designs and color schemes. To me, the sole purpose of the set is to give us as many low numbered cards with as many pieces of jerseys and autos as humanly possible. This means that things like design and photos of the players take a back seat to make the douchebags who don’t know any better jizz in their pants. Because of the jam packed set up of the cards, the product HAS to be considered high end, despite the fact that none of these cards are appealing to 90% of privileged portion of collectors who take pride in the way they look at the hobby. Those other 10% are die hard player collectors who live by a different creedo.

If it was up to me, I would always want better designs over more content. I love awesome looking cards, regardless of what company makes them. There are certain criteria I need to be true, like how I hate college jersey in the picture cards, but most of the time I base my want on how the card is put together. If a company uses sticker autos, but they are well done and well placed, it doesn’t matter to me. Look at SP Rookie Threads from this year, another set designed to pack as much into a product as possible. The difference between Triple Threads 2008 and SP Rookie Threads 2008 is that one set is well put together, nicely done with a cool theme, while the other focuses on all the wrong things, including printing plates with no player names and tiny player pictures.

SP Rookie Threads was designed around the look of a jersey. All the cards look like they have been sewn together like the numbers and tackle twill on a normal jersey, and I really appreciate the cool theme and idea for the set. Hell, they even made a set based on the NFL logo part of the jersey, which I thought was awesome. I bought the Peterson.

Look at Exquisite for this year, its done in an ornate and almost regal design, and the whole set follows suit in its picturesque glory. Exquisite also features more Jersey than Triple Threads in their RC Autos, and they still managed to fit in a large picture and a signature. Hell, the duals and triples were even done in a way that makes the Triple Threads ones look shameful. Large player picures and no die cut swatches to confusingly spell shit out. I love it.

If you want less high end examples, look at the way DLP did Classics the last few years, or even better, the way UD does SP Authentic EVERY year. For 100 dollars a box, UD has made Triple Threads and other poorly designed sets irrelevant. One other thing about sets like Classics and SP Rookie Threads is that they use sticker autos, but use them in a way that makes them not as noticible. Topps thinks they need to destroy the look of every card with GIANT foil stickers, or even the transparent, but not transparent foil stickers. Yes, they still stick out even when they are supposed to be clear.

Recently, Topps has put out a product that was solely designed to dump their entire store room of basketball stickers into a set before Panini takes over. This means that the set was actually somewhat necessary to utilize thousands of ugly foil stickers in the stockroom, but it is no excuse for the result. Now, we all know how much I fucking despise Topps’ design moves over the last few years, and this set is no exception. Because it was so quickly put together, you can expect that the design would suffer, but jesus, the set is fugly as hell. Add in the fact that each card is numbered to 9000, and you have a donkey turd on your hands.

The one thing that the nostalgic focused modern haters have right is that design used to be better. I agree 100%. However, I do think you can have the content that each product MUST have to survive and also the design to appease the people like me. I have seen the custom card designs out there, so I know it isnt impossible to design a nice set. Hopefully the manufacturers wont save the good stuff for the expensive sets exclusively, and will let it trickle down to the low end stuff too. When cards are designed with care, everyone wins. Take notice quickly, Topps.

First Look: 2009 Topps Football

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At this point, I think base Topps is completely worthless in this hobby, mainly with Chrome now at a ridiculously low price tag, and the fact that low end football doesnt have the same following as low end baseball. Add in that Chrome usually comes out a week or two later, and there is no reason to even think this will be a good buy.

With that, Topps has decided to make it a little bit more interesting by adding, you guessed it, manufactured letter autos of the RCs. Lets hope they dont end up like the disasters that were Topps Lettermen Letters. They also added dual autos and some extra gimmicks. Wow, didnt see that coming.

Ill wait for Chrome, but regardless, the design isnt great in my opinion, baseball OR football.

h/t Freedom Card Board