Review: UD's 2006-07 Beehive
One of the problems with late-season card sets is they seldom reflect what has happened within the second half of the season. Take Upper Deck's latest offering, the 2006-07 Beehive, for example.
Let's see. Nashville's Peter Forsberg is still in his Flyers uniform. Detroit's Todd Bertuzzi is shown in one of his rare games with the Panthers. The Islanders' Ryan Smyth is, yep, you guessed it, shown with the Oilers. I'm sorry, but given today's technology, I believe there's plenty of time to show, at this stage of the season, players with their new teams.
Couple that with a 100-card set, featuring nothing but top-name players, and Upper Deck has produced another yet product that disappoints. At first, I said I would going to pass on this product. A trip to the card store, under the guise of needing rookie toploaders, was my undoing. Another lesson learned, I suppose.
Granted, there are plenty of variations, including 5 x 7 cards, autographs (including such old-timers as Patrick Roy, Ray Bourque and Tony Esposito) and scrap-filled memorabilia cards. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but my pulls were far from that lineup. Mine was Detroit's Tomas Holmstrom. Thrilling, huh? The autograph card? Chicago's Rene Bourque (not a sticker autograph, either).
The 60-card rookie subset, too, offers the usual suspects -- Boston's Phil Kessel, Colorado's Paul Statsny, Los Angeles' Anze Kopitar, Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal and San Jose's Matt Carle, Joe Pavelski and Marc-Edouard Vlasic.
Let's see. Nashville's Peter Forsberg is still in his Flyers uniform. Detroit's Todd Bertuzzi is shown in one of his rare games with the Panthers. The Islanders' Ryan Smyth is, yep, you guessed it, shown with the Oilers. I'm sorry, but given today's technology, I believe there's plenty of time to show, at this stage of the season, players with their new teams.
Couple that with a 100-card set, featuring nothing but top-name players, and Upper Deck has produced another yet product that disappoints. At first, I said I would going to pass on this product. A trip to the card store, under the guise of needing rookie toploaders, was my undoing. Another lesson learned, I suppose.
Granted, there are plenty of variations, including 5 x 7 cards, autographs (including such old-timers as Patrick Roy, Ray Bourque and Tony Esposito) and scrap-filled memorabilia cards. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but my pulls were far from that lineup. Mine was Detroit's Tomas Holmstrom. Thrilling, huh? The autograph card? Chicago's Rene Bourque (not a sticker autograph, either).
The 60-card rookie subset, too, offers the usual suspects -- Boston's Phil Kessel, Colorado's Paul Statsny, Los Angeles' Anze Kopitar, Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal and San Jose's Matt Carle, Joe Pavelski and Marc-Edouard Vlasic.
Though I didn't pull a true rookie card of Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin, I did find the parallels shown above in my box. Buffalo's Drew Stafford and Nashville's Alexander Radulov stood out among the true rookie cards.
I do applaud Upper Deck for a kind of quirky innovation. Most card sets I have compile the teams in alphabetical order, beginning with Anaheim. The Beehive base set simply reverses the order, beginning with Washington's Alexander Ovechkin as card No. 1.
That, in itself, is not enough, though, to lift the Beehive product out of the scrap heap of disappointment that Upper Deck and its various nameplates have produced this season.
I do applaud Upper Deck for a kind of quirky innovation. Most card sets I have compile the teams in alphabetical order, beginning with Anaheim. The Beehive base set simply reverses the order, beginning with Washington's Alexander Ovechkin as card No. 1.
That, in itself, is not enough, though, to lift the Beehive product out of the scrap heap of disappointment that Upper Deck and its various nameplates have produced this season.
Labels: cards, Evgeni Malkin, reviews, Upper Deck
posted by Puckhound at 2:05 PM
2 Comments:
definitely don't bother with Beehive for gaining auto materials unless you want 5x7s for players to sign (they already have a facsimile auto, so if this bothers you, again, move on).
for cheap/thorough card sets, opt for OPC, or wait for the gigantic Parkhurst issue to be released (no gloss!)
as for OPC, I picked up a team set of the Kings yesterday, and it's pretty thorough with only 2-3 real omissions - to be expected on a team with so much roster turnover. it's the first Aaron Miller card I've seen in almost 2 years! no joke.
while ordering the cards in the set by franchise does make things easier for the team collector, it serves really no other purpose. I may be wrong in this, but I blame UD for this silly "innovation" in the first place, and it especially makes no sense for products with very tight player selection like Black Diamond or Beehive. that's what checklists are for.
That's right. I remember you mentioning a dearth of Aaron Miller cards.
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