Posted in Autographs, Baseball Cards, Uncategorized

Looking ahead to 2009 Upper Deck Spectrum

Posted on by Paul

Mario posted a preview of next year’s Upper Deck Spectrum set at Wax Heaven today, and it seems to be getting universally panned.

The base set is just 100 cards, with another 30 rookies added into the mix. At 5 cards per pack / 14 packs per box and three promised “hits” per box (including two autographs), it’s not going to be cheap to put together a set… but why would you bother?

The cards are inoffensive. They remind me of a mix between this year’s Starquest and Upper Deck X sets. They’re not great and they’re not terrible. They’re just there.

The player checklist is uninspired. My Mets are represented by Jose Reyes, David Wright, Johan Santana, Carlos Beltran and Jon Niese. Now on the plus side, the card companies may finally be getting the message that Pedro’s days as a star are over. On the minus side, if I’m going to get one rookie to represent the Mets in an early 2009 card set, I want it to be Daniel Murphy — the guy that actually contributed in 2008.

There’s just short of a zillion parallels. (Think Upper Deck Heroes.) And they’ve got celebrity autograph cards.

Now the celebrity autographs are the only part of Upper Deck Spectrum that actually looks interesting. I don’t really see any A-listers on the checklist, but there are a few B-list guys like Ricardo Montalban, Leonard Nimoy and Wes Craven and maybe 15-20 spots that are still listed as TBD.

But there are a ton of folks that worked on some of my favorite shows… and if these cards wind up (a) looking better than the Cheech Marin one that Mario posted and (b) being more affordable than the Inkworks ones that are out on the market, I’ll have fun shopping on eBay next year.

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2 thoughts on “Looking ahead to 2009 Upper Deck Spectrum”

  1. It depends on how many autographs there are, I’d think. I’m not really up on the Buffy and Firefly nonsports releases, but would I be correct that there weren’t many of those cards out there to begin with?

    (Firefly/Serenity goods go for ridiculous amounts anyway. I donated a Serenity keychain to a convention silent auction in 2007 and IIRC it sold for at least 10 times what I paid for the thing.)

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  2. True. I’m not sure what the print runs on the Inkworks autographs were, but some of them must have been ridiculously scarce. Some of first series Buffy autographs go for over $500.

    I’m hoping that most of these Spectrum cards will be common enough to go for around $10-$15.

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