Upper Deck has once again created a perfect trading card set, for hockey collectors only. This time around they produced an Allen & Ginter clone and titled it Champs.
For about $100 dollars, Champs offers a wonderful product with a great base and parallel (minis) design, wonderful on-card autographs, beautiful game-used relics, and the ultimate DNA cards.
As you can see from the scan below, I pulled a Woolly Mammoth Femur redemption, which is the case hit. While it truly is a wonderful pull, consider the fact that it rarely breaks $100 dollars on the secondary market. What’s important here is that for a C-Note you end up with well over 100 cards, a relic, and two on-card autographs.
God only knows what kind of critical acclaim Upper Deck would be receiving in 2009 if they treated their baseball license with the respect and dignity they give the N.H.L. To date, I have yet to bust a boring Upper Deck hockey brand. As a non-hockey collector and fan, you can’t do any better than that.
Ultimately, the reader decides the fate of these products.
What do YOU think of Upper Deck Champs?
base looks good, and so do the autos.
the jersey cards look a little too plain.
it was either cole hamels or woolly mammoth for my directory player. I guess i chose wrong! haha
seriously though, if you want to trade the redemption let me know. I think i picked up one more miller auto, (i think you have it already though) and would be willing to pick up some more on ebay to add in the trade.
let me know!
Nice design, but like everything else, it’s overpriced ($80-100 for a box containing only 110 cards) and weighed down by non-hockeys inserts (the DNA cards) and unncessary parallels.
I’ll probably buy a base set on Ebay in a few months for a quarter of the price of a box.
Also what’s up with Gretzky and Kurri being in a Kings uni instead of the Oilers and with Gordie Howe being in a Hartford uni? If you are going to include retired players, picture them with their primary team for crying out loud!
I die for hockey and this set really rocks….!!!!!! Beautiful design, minis are great and the on card autos are a plus. I was trying to buy a wax but 100 bucks a piece is out of my scope, and that’s the only flaw I noticed so far.
I would consider kidnapping Andrew Miller and bringing him to your house like in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for that Mammoth redemption…let me know what you think…I get my chloroform ready.
Holy crap!! Nice Steve Mason Auto. He is probably going to be the ROY and Goalie collectors are fanatics. Nice.
Kinda similar to A&G don’t you think?
Those are some fine looking cards you have there Mario. Sorry you didn’t get any Early Doucet III Framed Parallels.
I’ve said for a while that UD does hockey well…much more in line with their basketball releases then with their baseball ones. I’m just disappointed that they never made good on sending us a box for review.
There are TONS of cards featuring Gretzky and Kurri in their Edmonton unis. It gets boring seeing them over and over again.
Champs is an OK product. I love Ginter and Mayo and hockey is my favorite sport, but like everything else UD does, they screw up all their hockey products. You get two autos per box, but they aren’t GOOD autos. I like the parallels and minis and all that, but the stuff isn’t available at retail (which is weird considering I bought a retail box at a card show – so they MADE retail, they just don’t sell it at retail). A product like this HAS to be available at retail because nobody buys cards at card stores (and for good reason). Who’s going to build a set when they have to pay $100 a box for this crap?
It would have been nice to see UD try something original, but that’s asking a bit too much.
Hockey collectors are rejoicing that UD’s exclusive license is up after the 09-10 season. This has been a complete disaster all around. I’d love to see Topps and Paniniruss get back into the game.
Will Topps be suing them over this?
Mario is there anyway I could get the Bobby Hull Card? I’m just wondering what happened to you at the card show? I take it your feeling better from your trip to the hospital?
I agree with mfw13, it’s a beautiful base set and I like the autographed cards. But what the heck man, I hate those dinosaur and reptile cards, they have nothing to do with hockey and it soils the set in my mind. If they just kept this to hockey I think it would be more widely accepted.
Dude, everyone likes dinosaurs. Upper Deck had three choices that’d appeal to everyone:
1. Dinosaurs
2. Attack Airplanes
3. Breasts
I would consider buying a hockey set for any one of those three inserts.
I bought some of this stuff a couple weeks ago and think it’s extremely… decent. The set looks good, but there’s just to much white around the edges. I’d much prefer to have a little more background. The minis are pretty nice looking, and I especially like the rookie minis. The fact that the parallels are simply different colored backs is a small minus in my mind. I could really take or leave the animal minis, but the fossil relics are pretty sweet. I remember seeing Jurassic Park when I was 8 or 9 and absolutely falling in love with dinosaurs. Owning, or having the chance to own a token of that young love would be great. I say you sell it on ebay and buy yourself something nice.
Incidentally, I got a case hit from my box as well. Mine was in the form of a red-backed Mario Lemieux auto, which is now proudly displayed in the frame hanging on my wall.
Thanks for the comment, Groat.
I am thinking of selling it and having someone design a new logo for the site, plus buying a card on eBay as a prize for the 1,000,000 visitor, which should happen in a week or so.
Can you say…. Allen and ginter.
That Mason is awesome. As a Jackets fanatic, I was stoked to pull a Rick Nash redemption in my couple of packs. Got it in the mail yesterday even!
A great product, though, IMO.
I would have had a conniption fit over this stuff 2 or 3 years ago and bought as much as I could. Right now? Meh. It’s too expensive at 6+ a pack the only place I’ve seen it. Like Thomas said, there’s no retail so I can’t pick up a cheap pack to see if I really like it or not. I live in Atlanta where our hockey team is a joke so there is no one selling singles anywhere. It reminds me of Topps C55 Hockey from 2003, another set I was interested in but couldn’t find anywhere at all. Yeah, it’s nice, but who the hell cares if it’s overpriced and impossible to find??
I like the don’t steal warning on the redemption : )
I forgot to mention earlier that one of the biggest problems I have with this set is the fact that they’re printed on extremely thin card stock. I’m sure this was done to put it in line with the original set, but they seem like they’d damage VERY easily.
I really like this stuff.
Yeah, what a few have said. I wouldn’t give too much respect to upper deck for the quality of the set considering theye ripped off almost every aspect of A&G. I guess there wasn’t a Team Orange in hockey.
i’m with eric on the a&g look. a “champs” baseball set would cool.
This is really an SP-calibre “hits” product, under the guise as a retro product. The hits are actually pretty good for the price, Mason will almost surely win the Calder (for rookie of the year) and the mammoth card is awesome. It is silly to have fossils in a sport card set, but truthfully I’d rather have that than a 1/4 square inch cutout of some guy’s sweaty jersey.
That said, what is the point of a retro product that has such a nice design, but for only 100 base cards? Allen+Ginter, Heritage, etc, are large enough to be standalone sets; this set has the same 100 players they have for all their other SP sets. Why do I need 10 different cards of a quasi-star like Olli Jokinen a year, when another star that might be slightly less well-known like Andrei Markov only gets a couple? Couldn’t they have twice as many base cards in a box, make the base set twice as big so you still have to buy as many boxes, but at least make it worth your while to actually collect the set?
I realy like the dinosaur cards. that stuff is quirky but some fun and it works.
It’d be fun to try getting a TTM on the pirannha card from Nick Punto
How much do you want for the Mason Auto?