A Day Late and a License Short

I'm still without access to my computer and wasn't able to chime in on the big MLB vs. Upper Deck settlement that was reached yesterday. It turns out that many of my thoughts in my original post on the topic were right on the money. Upper Deck was dumping a ton of their relic and autograph inventory. They rushed three products out at once with no previews because they knew exactly what was going to happen. This was their last hurrah in baseball and only the settlement kept it from being the last we'd hear from the company as a whole.

Given the terms of the settlement, I don't see Upper Deck as being able to produce baseball card sets as we know them in the near future. What I could see is Upper Deck leveraging their spokesmen and producing sets on those subjects. It would be something along the lines of the Team USA box set which Upper Deck also lost the rights to. The set could be limited to one player or could contain a mix of players. I think that a lot of collectors would love a 35 card Derek Jeter set where every set contained either a relic card (in single, dual, triple and quad varities), autograph card or autographed relic. Heck, produce some of the cards in all-time favorite set types such as Exquisite and Sweet Spot. Put the right cards in there to chase and collectors will buy it.

I will miss Upper Deck, but the truth is that it has been a long time since I've purchased a new box of Upper Deck product. In my opinion, Upper Deck products were far too expensive and that's a huge factor for me. Collectors love Masterpieces, but a lot more of them love it now that you can get the boxes cheaply then did when it was first released and going for twice as much. OPC that was supposedly going to limited due to a previous lawsuit and settlement is still sitting around and low prices. Those cheaper boxes are still going to be around and I'll continue buying them.

There's also part of me that's not going to miss Upper Deck. They've pulled too much crap that shows they have absolutely no respect for the hobby or collectors. Their customer service was terrible. This is not the Upper Deck of the 90s that took the collecting world by storm. That's the Upper Deck that I've been missing for a while now. I have a hard time feeling bad for Upper Deck when they knew full well what they were doing when they released those three sets.

In other news: It's now been two and a half weeks and the construction is still ongoing up on the third floor. I'm not sure what's taking so long, but it might have something to do with the fact that the contractors never get here earlier than 10:30 in the morning. I'm hoping that they're done today so that I've got the weekend to work on it since I still have to paint and arrange the furniture before I can start setting things up.

I had no idea things would stretch out this long so I'm going to reveal the big news which will probably be a letdown at this point. I was sent a box of Prospects+ by TRISTAR to break on my site. I feel badly because it has been sitting here for almost a week now and I haven't been able to post the box break. Don't worry though because once I'm up and running and can post the box break, I'm going to celebrate by having a handful of TRISTAR related contests.

I've got a bunch of news to post, a very cool TTM to write about, trades to send out and a small pile of new cards to write about. Ideally, room preparation would be Saturday and blog stuff can take place on Sunday. Wish me luck.