Wednesday, October 10, 2007

2006 Fleer Ultra

Emboldened by Thorzul's experience with a Toys R Us box, I walked into the Target on the way to work planning to buy a repack box of my own. Once in the store however, I got cold feet. the Target boxes have 4 packs + 100 bonus cards in a box for 10 bucks. The only box I was remotely interested in had a pack of last year's Bowman Heritage and some Upper Deck junk showing and I just couldn't pull the trigger. I decided to snag three packs out of the $1.59 box instead. The first one is last year's Fleer Ultra. This is a Hobby pack and I love getting hobby packs for retail prices.

RBI11 Albert Pujols RBI Kings
178 Gary Sheffield
122 Oliver Perez
66 Cesar Izturis
DP6 Diamond Producers Manny Ramirez
110 Mike Cameron
54 Aubrey Huff
27 Gold Jeff Francouer

This is the first edition of Ultra produced by Upper Deck after the buyout and they did a good job. The design is Ultra all the way, down to the crisp action shots and the ubiquitous foil script name. They even advertise an insert card per pack, another Fleer staple. This pack does that one better, as I pulled cheesy looking inserts of Manny and Albert in this pack. Manny's "diamonds in the infield dirt" insert motif is a good reminder not to wear expensive jewelry when sliding into third. There is also a Gold parallel card of Jeff Francoeur, which is worth the price of admission as far as I'm concerned. I am pretty happy with this pack, lots of stars and even the players I don't care about look good. Cesar Izturis means nothing to me, but I really like the photo of him ranging for a grounder with the Chevron cars watching in the background. The only negative about the pack is that over exuberant pack searchers scrubbed the top card with their fingernail, so Albert's card is pretty dinged up and has a sort of low tech lenticular vibe to it now. Eh, who cares, it's still a card of Prince Albert and you have to expect these things buying loose packs from Target.

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