Saturday, May 7, 2011

A Cool Upper Deck Mailday

So, I busted a box of 2009/10 Upper Deck Basketball Draft Edition back in December. That was the awesome case that produced a Michael Jordan autograph and a ton of base cards that nobody wants. Some of the autographs did very well on eBay and then I was surprised when some of the autographs that wouldn’t sell for a dollar on eBay went for a few bucks on CheckOutMyCards. Well, that case produced a few cards to be determined. There were seven Jordan Classic jersey cards that took four months to be redeemed and my Michael Johnson /99 non-existent card that had to be replaced twice. Wanna see what I got in the mail? I had a lot of fun opening these up. Each envelope had an advertisement for Evolution so now I’ve got enough of those to wallpaper my mancave.

JenningsI’ll start off with the Brandon Jennings card because he’s the only player that I only pulled one redemption card of. It was slightly frustrating to pull seven redemption cards and only get 4 different players, but at least I got some good players.

The downside of this set was that many of the top rookies from this set aren’t included in the base set and also don’t have autographs to be pulled. You won’t find Blake Griffin, Tyreke Evans, DeMar DeRozen or Brandon Jennings, but three of those players were included in the jersey card set. Of the 13 cards in the set, there are three different Brandon Jennings, three B.J. Mullens, three DeRozans, two Evans and two Jrue Holidays. So, chances are that you’re going to get good players since there aren’t many options. The frustrating thing for me was that I got the exact same number card for each of the players that I got duplicates of. It would have been nice to get different cards from the players that I pulled twice, but that wasn’t the case.

DeRozan

Here’s DeMar DeRozen with a teal swatch. When I searched eBay, every card from this set that I saw listed had one of these teal swatches and so I assumed that they all looked like this, but there are more ot these jerseys than just teal. I would find that out fairly quickly.

DeRozenColors

Bank error in your favor. Collect $100. In my case, collect a different DeMar DeRozen card that I wasn’t supposed to get. As you can see, there’s a different picture on this card and a very cool jersey swatch with a couple of different colors. I guess this is the closest you can get to a patch on something like this.

MullensTeal

Here’s a plain teal card of B.J. Mullens. It kind of seems strange that there appear to be so many teal jersey swatches out there because when you look at the jerseys that are in the pictures, there sure seems to be a lot more dark blue or black then teal in the jerseys.

MullensNavy

Oh, hello darker jersey swatch. Yes, it’s the same picture as the other card, but it has a completely different colored swatch within the card. It might make for an interesting lot on eBay if I list both cards together or I can just publicize one auction in the other’s listing.

Evans

Here’s a different looking card of Tyreke Evans. He’s the only player from this year that ended up playing for the red and white team. There’s no guarantee that there players all participated in the Jordan Brand Classic in the same year since different amounts of time spent in college would put them in different JBC games.

EvansColors

Here’s another card with the same picture, but a different jersey swatch. This one is mostly red with a little bit of white in the bottom left corner.

It’s pretty cool that even though I pulled a lot of duplicate jersey cards, I didn’t end up with any similar looking cards. Whoever picked out my redemption cards at Upper Deck did a good job of making sure that I got a variety in my redemptions. I’m pretty happy with what I ended up getting.

NoahAuto

Here’s the first card out of the two that Upper Deck sent me the second time around as a replacement for the Michael Johnson autograph. I figured that if the Bulls end up winning the NBA Championship this year then this card could do pretty well on eBay. I’m not really a big fan of Noah and he seems like a bit of a crybaby complaining about Garnett, but he is a monster on the boards.

NoahAutoBack

Then I turned the card over and saw the following. The bottom left of this card is completely folded up on the back. There’s also a notch in the middle of the bottom edge, but only on the back. The damage to this card is strange. The corner damage isn’t like what you’d get from dropping the card since only one layer of the card is wrecked. You can’t even notice the damage when looking at the front of the card. So, I’ve contacted Upper Deck about sending this card back for replacement.

PierceAuto

When Upper Deck offered me this card over the phone, I wondered why they didn’t just send this originally since Pierce was on my list of players that I sent them. I guess there was some disagreement originally on what the value of the Michael Johnson card would be. I explained to them that you couldn’t base the value on a Beckett price because that would be based on the fact that the card was never produced. You have to base it on what the card would be worth if it had been produced. I suggested a value of $100 and they ended up agreeing with me. I guess this Pierce card books for $60 which isn’t too shabby.

Book value aside, this is a great card because it is hard signed and well designed. What do I love on cards? Team colors. These cards have team colors. There’s a big picture of the player and plenty of space for the player to sign the card. This is the gold version of the Pierce card and it is numbered to just 34 copies. The Noah card is the silver version and is numbered to 50.

That’s one more beautiful looking Paul Pierce autograph card in my collection. This is the first one that I’ve picked up in a long time. Most of them were acquired before I was a dad and had given up on busting boxes and spent my trading card money solely on singles.

The Draft case is now finished for the most part. I’m very happy with these final additions. I get a great card to add to my collection and some cards that might sell for a few bucks on eBay or COMC. Right now, I’m leaning towards COMC since there aren’t any of these cards on there.

Thanks Upper Deck. Bok Bok.

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