Just when I thought I might be the first to post a certain type of pack, dayf beats me to the punch. All I can do is try to write a more entertaining post in order to save face, Japanese Salaryman-style.
Upper Deck X was manufactured back in the late 1970s using machinery and technology from the current day. The time portal that enabled these cards to be produced was used to expedite the distribution process within today's retail outlets. Vertical integration, bitches! The only catch was that the production facility just happened to be a small, murky office on Manhattan's sleazy 42nd Street, just above one of the more notorious of the era's grindhouse theatres, The Heavenly Throb. The content of the oft-X-rated features managed to seep its way into the card stock used to produce UDX, resulting in the first subliminally-exploitative major card company release. Touching the glossy coating ignites an effect, not unlike the Stendahl Syndrome, that produces a visceral flashback to the flea-pit features gazed upon by evenly-spaced male audience members wearing dingy raincoats and paying their admission with bills and coins bearing questionable coating.
If you can stomach it, let's tear in. Eeewwww, I think the first couple of cards are stuck together.
Top to Bottom:
40 Miguel Cabrera (The location of Cabrera's team is the origin of this sensory experience. Like ozone in the nostrils, the first whiff of exploitation hints at
Detroit 9000, but this is followed by a wave of pure Detroit motorworks and urban decay.
Damnation Alley produces a tableaux that is quite possibly the most authentic recreation of new-millennium Detroit ever produced. As this poster boasts, the aural transmissions are indeed in "Sound 360." Despite the PG rating, the faint of heart need not apply.)
3 Brandon Webb Die-Cut Parallel (The William Shatner vehicle
Kingdom of the Spiders will jump off this Webb when touched. Days of skitchy heroin addict withdrawal symptoms can be yours.)
X4-RH Ryan Howard Xponential (With no better tool of provocation available with which to lure the seediest of clientele into darkened theatres than the letter X, this insert hearkens back to the 1975 classic,
The Beast in Space. While Upper Deck clearly stole from the poster and DVD cover art for this set's design, at least it was lifted from a classic of Italian cinema surpassing all but the most brilliant works of Antonioni, De Sica, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.)
FC Frank Catalanotto UDX Signatures (Grasping this card produces images of still frames from I
lsa: She-Wolf of the SS. Sure, there's no literal connection between the two, but it just so happens that the best card in the pack is paired with the grandaddy of all exploitation/grindhouse films. And yes, that is my DVD in the scan, taken from the
OOP Anchor Bay Ilsa box set. Yes, be jealous...be very jealous.)
18 Derrek Lee (I will not break my legally binding non-portrayal agreement, but rest assured that you do get a poster. While the enemy from the south might be in a World Series hunt, this card evokes a
Woman Hunt. Yeah, that looks pretty tasteless, but as a New World Pictures release, this is not shocking. Man...even I'm slightly offended by that poster. Sorry.)
88 Felix Hernandez (For the last card in the pack, you'll get nothing better than
The Last House on the Left. The film that inspired a slew of imitators, among them
The Last House on Dead End Street and
Don't Go in the House, would have earned an X rating, had it not been for some back-door shenannagins from director Wes Craven. After being asked repeatedly by the ratings board to trim scenes down to earn an R rating, Craven obliged...and then borrowed a friend's R-rating header, spliced it into his print, and then snuck in the offending scenes. Nice.)
Verdict: B+
I'm happier with my pack than dayf was with his, even though mine was retail. The auto is on a sticker, but it's really hard to tell. I agree with the sentiment that this is a one-and-done type of set (i.e. not a set-builder's joy). I will not get pulled back in by this godfather. And I'm not holding my breath for Upper Deck NC-17.
My brain is rather fried with news of the Cardinals recent offseason moves, so it's time to calm down with a pack of budget shiny stuff. Upper Deck X looked ridiculous when it came out and is still ridiculous, but when you compare it with that Timelines set and even Baseball Heroes, I think it's fairly interesting. Don't get me wrong - I love the retro Heroes design as it makes me miss the days of getting excited about pulling Reggie Jackson inserts. But there's something fun about opening these packs that I can't really put my finger on.
51 - Torii Hunter
X2-DL - Derrek Lee Xponential X2 (I agree with most everyone who says they should have just made a set full of these shiny cards.)
27 - Jim Thome Die Cut Gold (This card is gold, but not shiny gold. It's more like that ugly gold color that Upper Deck used for the 2007 First Edition set.)
73 - Frank Thomas (Is Thomas going to play in 2009? He's had quite a career.)
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.
