Three Packs of 2009 SPx

Kim and I got 3 packs of Upper Deck SPx just because. It appears to be more affordable than last year's product. Out of the three packs, 2 didn't yield much more than a Matsui base card and one pack yielded several cards that will go into my personal collection.

This is what came out of the first two packs.


Out of the final pack I got these:


I pulled an Albert Pujols, Griffey Jr, Reyes patch card, Derek Jeter and Johan Santana (not pictured) in that exact order from one of the packs. It looks like the relic card doesn't really count as a card because there are only supposed to be 4 cards in a pack.

As for the design, the player is embossed a little bit on the card and as you can see the background of the card has almost a refractor or holographic shine to it. It's a simple design and is pretty sharp.

While the front is nice, the back of the card troubles me a bit. You have this huge graphic, small 3 sentence blurb and the player's stats only go as far back as 2004. The Griffey and Pujols also only go back to 2004. If you're going to cut stats short just show their 2008 stats to keep it relevant. Why do they cut the stats short? The 2008 SP Authentic got it right last year. They got a photo of the player, their FULL stats and even a little graphic that resembles the front of the card.

*shakes head* I just don't understand why the graphic is so big. It seems like a space filler and completely takes away from the back of the card.

A box of SPx is about $20-30 cheaper than last year. And I think that shows in the quality of the card. The card design is a hodgepodge of Upper Deck X, Spectrum and Authentic SP. I thought their 2008 cards were pretty cool and their design mirrored their cost. To get a cool looking card you gotta shell out a bit of money. Unless you're Topps Finest. There are 12 more cards in a box of SPx than Finest but I'd sacrafice those 12 cards for the cooler Topps cards.

This really should be a product that competes with Finest in terms of cool technology but that just doesn't seem to happen here. While they did bring down the price of SPx they also took hits in the style and creativity department. I can give a bit of praise to Upper Deck for attempting to make their SPx product more affordable and include more cards but they kinda missed the point. We don't want plain cheap cards. If we wanted that, we'd just buy Upper Deck X. We want cool looking cards that are affordable. If you make a cool card and put it at a relatively good price point, people will buy it.