170 Points Worth of 2004 Upper Deck Power Up

2004 Upper Deck Power Up #90 Green

In my collection: 4 #90 green, 1 #90 orange, 1 Shining Through

Griffey looks: creepy

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  A failed game-based release with a lot of personality.

This was another one-year-only, gaming-based set with a points system based on card rarity.  This is not the first time Upper Deck would try their hand at putting an interactive gaming spin on card collecting.  And who could blame them with the popularity of Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh and all that other nonsense that kids were blowing all their allowance money on (Please note that baseball card collectors have every right to make fun of gaming card collectors because our hobby is based on real people, not cartoon animals).

I am curious about what the rules were as it looks to me like a simple add-up-the-points system that is far too boring to be fun.  Perhaps it was done in the style of Battle (aka War) in which each person lays down the next card in their deck sight-unseen and the higher point card wins that round.  If that was the case, I would never play with Griffeys for fear of losing them.  Can you imagine having a Griffey Red valued at 500 points and someone pulling a Hank Blalock Blue?  In such a situation, I would probably be a bad sport by snatching back my Griffey and running in the opposite direction. 

Oh, wait.  Here ya go:

I hate pulling images from COMC (it feels tacky); but I found the rules to the game there on the back of a sticker card, and I have no stickers to scan.  This is not a game you play head-to-head against other collectors - it’s a game you play against everyone in the world with Internet access and some Upper Deck Power Up cards.  I assume you could only play a certain card once since each card has its own unique code, so I suppose the best strategy was to hoard high-value cards until you had enough to dominate everyone else.  It probably got harder to win as the weeks went by and the people who adopted the hoard-and-wait strategy started pulling the trigger.

I have no idea how popular the game actually was, and as you can see here the website is officially out of service.  Did anyone out there actually play this?  On second thought don’t admit to that.

Here are the Griffeys:

2004 Upper Deck Power Up #90 Green and Orange

I have the green and orange versions, the two least rare cards from this set. 

This is one of those “big head” cards (there are a lot out there).  You usually find these sporting caricatures á la early-90’s Score All-Stars, but this one has a Helena Bonham-Carter Queen of Hearts quality that is as creepy as creepy gets.  Also, Junior’s facial expression is hilarious.  That’s the same face I make when I’m trying to make a toddler laugh (it works).  The “wacky” font on the back makes the card difficult to read, but I like how it mentions the movies Junior has been in.  And I’m crazy about the flipped-up shades, especially in portrait mode.  It’s so nerd-chic it makes me want to sip champagne at an MC Chris concert.

Out of curiosity and because I may have to buy them someday, I did a quick search in the usual places for any example of the remaining colors of Griffey but found nothing.  In fact I ran a search for all the rarest colors of any player and found only one example: a blue Pujols on eBay for a whopping $200. 

I can only assume that the reds and blues were like the proverbial golden snitches, sporting point values so high that they practically guarantee the cardholder a win.  But now that the game is over, their only value is their rarity.  The blues were inserted at 1:240 packs, and they’re not serial-numbered.  So how many are there? 

One interesting thing about the cards is that the rarer the color, the cooler the card.  They didn’t just assign values to colors arbitrarily; the cards are actually better.  The common green version has pretty much no dazzle to it.  Orange is nearly identical to the green, but with the step up to purple you gain a shiny refractor aspect.  I’ve never seen a red, but the blue, it seems, is comparable to a super-refractor with lots of cool textured holofoil and translucence. 

If anyone has a purple, red, or blue, send me a nice scan or trade me the card itself.  I’d love to post them here.

2004 Upper Deck Power Up Shining Through #ST-60

This insert, worth 50 points, is also useable in the game.  While colorful and not unattractive, it’s that mildly relective dull chrome UD used on a lot of their cards in the 2000’s.  It’s shiny but doesn’t scan very well.  It’s also got more stats on it than the base card.

Here’s a list of Griffeys from 2004 Upper Deck Power Up that I still need:

#90 Purple (Ultra Rare) (250 points)

#90 Red (Super Rare) (500 points)

#90 Blue (Mega Rare) (1000 points)

Sticker #PU-60

One more bit of the required blogger nit-pickiness: F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that using exclamation points is like laughing at your own joke.  While I think this perspective is a little extreme, I'm not crazy about their use right in the title of the product.  I get that they're trying to zhush up the brand and make it more exciting, but I find that oftentimes exclamation marks have the opposite effect.  This is one of those times.

Despite all that, this is my most positive review of a game-based card set so far.  Now here's some close-ups of the orange one.

2004 Upper Deck Power Up #90 Orange

I Opened 60 Packs of 2010 Upper Deck

In my collection: 5 #445, 2 Season Biography #SB-11, 2 20^th Century Heroes #BHA-1, 1 Supreme S-92 Green, 1 Supreme S-92 Blue

Griffey looks: in full-on swing away mode

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  This is Junior’s sunset card from the brand that he helped build.

The set: 2010 Upper Deck was doomed from the start.  The brand was dealing with lawsuits and licensing issues that contributed to this being their last flagship baseball set.  See my other post for limited details.

Decent pulls from this set are very few and far between.  I know this because I bought a hobby box and a jumbo box from dacardworld.com a few months back for incredibly cheap just for the joy of ripping all those packs.  That’s 60 packs and I still didn’t get very much bang for my buck.  Don’t get me wrong, I got a ton of cards and a whole lot of keepers, but the product lacked the excitement I had come to associate with box breaks and Upper Deck products in general.  If you still want to buy some, take a look at this and this.

A lot of standard action shots and a few that were clearly taken in a portrait studio.  None of the photography here is exceptional.  I did notice a whole lot of cards featuring pitchers at the plate, though. 

There was some value in the packs I opened.  I pulled the Posey rookie, but there was only one out 1,080 cards.  

The gold parallels (#/99) are nice but they’re a really tough pull, and there are so many cards in the checklist that it’s barely worth hoping for a good one.  I pulled two and already shipped one off in trade packages.  The other one is no Griffey but still pretty good:

I also got a couple of Portrait, Pure Heat and All World inserts, but the seeding was incredibly sparse.  You would think they’d be numbered for as rare as they were:

One high point of the product is the cool Joe DiMaggio Heroes Set:

This design is done to death, but I pulled a nice quantity of these cards and now have mild interest in completing the set.

Another thing they did this year that I love is the inclusion of stadium cards.  Even the photography on these is outstanding.

This one is the best-looking of the group.

And these two, which while I don't count them as Griffey cards, are stored in the Griffey binder.

There are also these bizarro Celebrity Predictor cards.  I’m still pretty clueless as to what the point is, but there’s something about them that makes me want to collect every one.  I pulled a whopping eight of the 10-card set (though they’re numbered as though it’s 20 cards).  I am missing CP-1/2 Jennifer Aniston & John Mayer and CP-17/18 Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt.  I’m not a big celebrity guy, but I do want these.

Upper Deck also added these things called Double-Takes which are short-printed base cards that have been lightly photo-shopped.  The differences are so slight that they can be difficult to spot.  I don’t have any to scan because I wasn’t looking for them when I opened these boxes.  At 1:96 packs, I could very well have landed one and already given it away.  Oh, well.

You are guaranteed one relic card per hobby box.  I pulled Nick Markakis, but I traded it away pretty soon after that.  The jumbo box on the other hand contained zero relics.  

Besides what you see here, this set is nothing to get your panties in a twist over.  Let’s just get to the Griffey:

 

It’s a nice horizontal shot of Junior in full-on swing away mode.  I really like this picture, but I can’t help wondering what it would have been if they knew this was going to be his sunset card.  

This could have been a great sunset picture or even a cool unnumbered SP considering Junior’s history with the Upper Deck brand.  I think including it in the above insert cheapens this awesome card.

Another reasonably cool insert design.  There is an autographed version of this card that is hand-numbered out of 90.

These strike me as a 1:1 or 1:2 seeded insert, especially considering the 100-card checklist, but they’re much harder to pull than that.  Green is the more common of the pair at 1:8 packs and Blue is seeded a sparse 1:27 - apart from the color, the cards are identical.  Why were they so stingy with the inserts in 2010?  I am assuming these were going to come in more colors that were slated for release in series 2 which never happened.

 

Here are the Griffeys I’m missing from 2010 Upper Deck:

#445 Gold #/99

20^th Century Heroes Art Card Signatures #BHA-1 #/90

Upper Deck Game Jersey #UDGJ-KG

Upper Deck Game Jersey Patch #UDGJ-KG #/25

Also #546 U.S. Cellular Field

1992 Score: the Miami Vice of Base Sets

In my collection: 9 regular, 9 All-Star, 5 90's Impact Player, 2 Superstar

Griffey looks: like he's swinging a champagne flute

Is this a good Griffey card? Yes.  One of my favorite action shots from Score.

The set: I'm convinced that this base set was designed by the same person who did the interior decorating for the beach house in Weekend at Bernie's.  While the layout isn't particularly awful, it does come across as cluttery and institutional with that big, honking color bar running vertical along the side and dominating the card. 

On top of that are each card's chosen colors which tend to have nothing to do with the team of the player depicted - quite the opposite: they are a gaudy mess.  Teal was really big back in the early 90's, so it's everywhere; but also this weird peach color coupled with a cacophony of pinks and pastels that irritate the eyes.  Case in point:

Here we have Cubs, White Sox, and Cubs.  Let's try and follow the logic:

Card 1 - Cubs - Team colors: Blue and Red.  Card colors: Blue and Magenta. (OK, at least this is close)
Card 2 - White Sox - Team colors: Black & White.  Card colors: Peach and Aqua. (Bwah?)
Card 3 - Cubs - Team colors: Blue and Red.  Card colors: Blue and Magenta Peach and Aqua.  (Fnuh?)

This color palette, which can only be described as "Zack Morris Bedspread" is bonkers.  I get that everyone was just coming off the massive coke binge that was the 80's and taste was a little questionable (looking at you, '92 Bowman rookies), but I find it hard to believe that no one stepped forward and said, "No!  Everybody stop!  We have families to go home to, guys.  We can't unleash this on the world."  There had to be someone at Score in 1992 that didn't hate eyes.



Really, Score.  Pastels?

I would like to point out that I usually have Score's back.  I think they put out a heck of a product in the late 80's/early 90's and innovated in several areas years before the premium brands came along and got credit for it.  However, those three cards you see above are perfect examples of what you can expect from the entire set, and I cannot defend those cards to you.

The lack of horizontal cards along with all this run-of-the-mill action photography also contribute to the base set being a little boring.  A mixture of action photos and portaits maybe with some fun or unique poses every now and then would round out the set a lot better.  Instead it's this guy's pitching, this guy's batting, pitching, pitching, batting, fielding, batting, ooooh bunting!  Pitching, batting. 

Here are a couple of relatively baddass exceptions:

This is the year Score would introduce into their sets a whole bunch of serial numbered cards as well as autographed cards from Chuck Knoblauch, Carl Yastrzemski, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle.  While they were already very much on the insert/subset trolley, in '92 they went ballistic with the inserts and subsets and limited-edition cards and tributes.  Without going into too much detail, here's a smattering of all the non-base and subset cards from '92 Score:



Not pictured because I don't have it: Nolan Ryan.  Oops.







Griffey didn't make Score's Dream Team in '92.  Still, the other Dream Team cards are pretty damn awesome.



Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth - Per Baseballcardpedia: "The Memorabilia subset cards all feature items from the famed Barry Halper collection. Halper was a part-owner of Score at the time."



Limited to 150,000, unnumbered

 

Limited to 30,000 per card, unnumbered.



Cooperstown Cards are back!  More painting-y than '91 but still great-looking cards.

 Now, on to the Griffeys:

The first in the set, Griffey's is another one of the better put-together cards in '92 Score.  Thankfully yellow and blue make green; hence, the coloration here is not the travesty that it is on some specimens.  Plus the motion of the bat here makes it look like Griffey is swinging a champagne flute. 

And just in case you read the back of this card, elan is defined as "dash or vivacity; verve."  It's one of those words that rarely gets used because it sounds stupid.

The Score All-Star subset cards are notorious for their caricatures.  Sadly this is probably the best one of Griffey that Score ever did (Wait 'til you see the worst - I don't want to give it away, but they make him look like Darryl Strawberry after a fight).

This 90-card insert (!) has Junior at mid-trot, suspended in air as he rounds third.  The picture on the front is unique as you don't see too much of Griffey the baserunner.  

Sadly the unremarkable design of this insert prevented it from standing out among the droves of Griffey cards that were being produced in the early 90's.  It looks lik they used the first version of Print Master to make this.  And is that Times New Roman font in super heavy italics?  Ugh.

Still, both the front and back pictures are good and so is the blurb with the Al Kaline quote. 

Now this is what I wanted when I was a kid: bright colors, a cool split-fade, and a big ass yellow star that proclaims, "This - this here is the guy."  The card itself looks like a big ol' peice of candy.  Plus you've got Junior having just line-driven (?) one over the second baseman's head on the front and a giant, borderless superimposed Griffey head on the back.  No complaints, Score.  This is a solid card.

Some of the base cards (the ones with somewhat appropriate colors) weren't so bad, but the ones that missed the mark did so so thoroughly that they throw off the entire set.  I really do like the Franchise inserts of classic players, though, as well as the return of Cooperstown Cards.  Both of those inserts were ahead of their time. 

Score would make a set of cards for Proctor & Gamble in 1992, but I'm saving that one for another post....

Today marks the nine-year anniversary of Griffey's 500th home run.  Congrats, Junior!  We here at The Junior Junkie will be celebrating with a pizza party and a small offering of Pepsi and marshmallows at the Graltar (Griffey altar - I'm working on the name).