RIP, Upper Deck?

I, for one, look forward to our new Topps overlords.

 

Disagree on the design aspect. UD may have ruined the hobby, but they forced everyone to get on their games vis-a-vis production. Stuff was clean, crisp, clear. Nowhere near the amount of printing issues like you found in the Topps packs. Some of the Topps design stuff from the early and mid-'80s was brutal, too.

 

At least you can still upper deck somebody you don't like.

 

Sorry, Topps acquired the rights to that, too.

 

In that case, I'm going to upper-deck Topps.

 

I still collect sportscards. It's a nostalgic thing from when I was a kid. I remember buying pack after pack of 1980 Topps Baseball trying to put a full set together. Factory issued sets were a few years away. Sportscard shops were a rarity. I bought most packs at convenience stores like 7-Eleven. Stop 'N' Go, Howdy Doody? And EZ Chek. I never did manage to get a full set put together. Those cards were damaged by the card pages of the time that eventually stuck to the card over time. When you removed the cards the image on the front would remain in the page pocket. Someday I want to work on putting that set together by getting a card lot off eBay and then work on tracking down the single cards I need. Buying a hand-collated set is not an option. The fun is in the search.

The card companies sold their souls to the investor collector in the mid-90s. It's near impossible to put a full set together now because there are so many short prints, parallels, and inserts. I've come really close to putting together the entire set of last year's Topps Football save for the 1/1 cards [platinum parallels and printing plates].

So now I stick to collecting the cards of a handful of players.

I still pick up packs of cards just to see what they're all about. But it's a rarity that I feel compelled to put a hand-collated set together. I wish the card companies would realize that they need to create a solid basic set of cards that have nice design and no short prints or parallels. I don't mind inserts as long as it's kept to one or two sets and there's one in each pack. There's people like me that have sons and/or nephews that we'd love to show our love of collecting sportscards. But because the companies are catering to the investor/collector they've priced kids and casual collectors out of the hobby. Eventually the investor/collectors will move on to something else and the card companies will be stuck. There's an entire generation of kids they've neglected to reach out to. And it's going to be hard to lure them into the fold once they're in their late teens or twenties.

 

Very well said.

 

The photos were crisp and clear and UD definitely produced a quality card free of all the stuff you mentioned. But for the price we were paying per pack and per card, I wanted more than a generic design. I thought Topps did a great job recovering from its '80s malaise in 1990 and 1991 as well as with the first edition of Stadium Club ('91? '92? I was out of collecting by then but really liked how those cards looked).

 

The Donruss set from last year was actually pretty cool. They had 100 cards in the set, 50 were hall of famers and/or former "greats" and the other 50 were recent draftees. They could not use team names so the Yankees players were New York (A.L.), the Reds were Cincinnati, etc. The set was entirely players or former players not in the MLBPA. That's how they got around it, by signing contracts directly with the players.

 

Topps tried to do this with a set called Topps Total about five years ago. I think there were around 700 cards in the set and the packs were 99 cents. Not flashy or anything even though I do think they stuck a jersey card or auto card in every once in awhile. Upper Deck did the same thing with the Upper Deck 40 Man set, a set with every player on every team's 40-man roster. I tried to put it together but it was way too big. I did get a Mark McGwire autographed card out of a box I bought. Sold it for $400, pre steroid shit hitting the fan.

 

I'll never forget ...

A very young mustardbased is going out of his mind because he can't find a farking Al Bumbry 1979 Topps. Anywhere. I've got about eleventyhundred of damn near everybody else, but can't find farking Al Bumbry.

Turns out one of my friends has a single Bumbry. So I trade for it. Come running home to tell the mustarddad that we've got Bumbry now (he was helping me with the collection). He asks me who I traded. Answer: Mark Belanger. His response: Uh, son -- now we don't have any Mark Belangers.

Clearly, six-year-old mb had not quite figured out the ins and outs of card-trading.

 

Here you go, mb.