Look at that wrapper. OH MY LORD just look at that wrapper! Holy sweet merciful crap LOOK AT THAT WRAPPER! This is the greatest mickyfickin' wrapper of the MILLENNIUM! The whole freakin' thing is rainbow holographic! It's not just the X, it's the whole damn THING! Just look at the back!
EVEN THE LEGALESE IS AN ORGY OF DANCING RAINBOWS! And they put odds back there! Shimmering colorful odds! When was the last time Upper Deck had odds on a pack? I think Pacific was still around. This is the wrapper of the year! No doubt. Man can you imagine the CARDS that they put in this pack? If the wrapper is this good, imagine the cards! What could they possibly look like? I'll bet it looks like this. Oh man oh man I have to open this to get a look at those beautiful cards!
What. The heck. Is that.
It looks like a zombie Fleer one-off set design come back from the grave. Woo, an X. Hooray, a gallon of silver ink. Yay, a design busier than the Wall Street suicide hotline. Now lets back up a sec. A wrapper that looks like this:
is advertising cards that look like this?The whole freaking wrapper is holographic foil, but they couldn't spare even a sliver of it for the actual cards? Sigh. Let's look at the one per pack Die-cut card.
Well that looks exactly the same as the base, just with bits hacked out of it. Or mostly hacked. If you look closely, you can see the two little divots at the top and bottom still firmly attached to the card. At least the roller marks on the card aren't visible in the scan. The card also appears to have no noticable difference from the base cards so if you really like the die-cut cards, you could theoretically get yourself a pile of base cards, a straight edge, an X-acto knife and a sturdy work table and make yourself a DIY-die cut set of your own. Again, sigh. There is this though:
Now this is the card I expected to see coming out of that wrapper. This is a bad-ass card. Unlike the rest of the pack which are bad ass-cards. Foil holographic mirrorboard with an embossed design. It's unfortunately a 200 card set (the base set is only 100 cards) that is inserted one per pack and has four different 'levels' whatever that means. So in review, the shiniest most incredible wrapper to appear this century contains six cards out of a wretched 100-card base set, a die-cut parallel that is only mostly die-cut and looks exactly like the base cards, and one actual decent looking card from a set twice the size of the wretched base set only with levels or fractures or parallels or whatever to make it impossible to complete at one per pack. Good job. UD. I guess I should list the pack rip.44 Jeremy Hermida
23 Geovany Soto
63 Carlos Beltran
81 Khalil Greene mostly die-cut
X2-HU Torii Hunter Xponential level 2? I think
78 Nate McLouth
64 Johan Santana
50 Howie Kendrick
Most of these cards are going straight into various trade piles. If UD had done a set with just the Xponentials and sold them as 3 or 4 card packs this might actually be kind of worth it. At least it would be a damn good looking set. This... this is awful. Beware kiddos... There are shiny sirens in the trading card aisle, ready to dash your collecting hopes straight into the rocks.
And the award for "Most Meaningless Product Not Named Opening Day" goes to....
ReplyDeleteThe contrast between the shinyness of the pack and the crappiness of the cards offers the same letdown as when you go into a restaurant and the girl that sits you down is really hot but your waitress is a dog.
ReplyDeleteFor the rest of my life I shall mentally move hyphens. Thank you. At least your pack gave ME something.
ReplyDeleteXKCD infects another soul.
ReplyDeleteMy work here is done.