2009-10 Upper Deck Greats of the Game Basketball

I am an Upper Deck fan and the most recent news of the loss of the NFL Properties license has made me pretty sad and this follows on the heels of loosing the MLB license and the recent court case regarding unlicensed baseball cards.

So now is the time for Upper Deck to step up, as a number of bloggers have posted about over the last few days, and really bring their “A” game. The results? The 2010 Greats of the Game Basketball set, a NCAA based card set containing some of the best players to ever play college roundball. While Upper Deck claims the set “…delivers nothing but net…” it actually looks like the designers may have actually just phoned this one in.

When you look at some of the inserts like the Old School Swatches cards you can see that the die-cut window was forced in to the base card's design and the rest of the elements were just shifted and jumbled with little concern for aesthetics. The basketball logo on the lower left corner is actually more pixelated then the base card's logo, the font used is just ugly and designers should know not to use a 12-pt white font over a red background, it causes distortion.

Box Configuration: 8 cards per pack, 16 packs per box
SRP: $62.99 at Blowout Cards

Box Break:
Get 2 Autographs in each box (they do appear to be on-card)
Get 1 Memorabilia in each box
At least 1 insert, numbered parallel or autograph in every pack

Case Break:
Find 2 foil numbered, themed autograph inserts per case!

I know that the cards have already started to hit eBay and some of the autographs are selling for a couple of hundred, but this set is a serious disappointment and I hope not a sign of the future from Upper Deck.