New Licensing Agreement (Upper Deck Exclusive) Discussion Thread

[Gord93]

Wow...took a long time to read all the previous posts! :)

At first I was thinking that I was disappointed that UD got an exclusive deal as I have been purchasing far more Panini products the past 4 years than UD. With Prizm I was hoping cards would be getting away from cardboard and moving towards the shiny thicker cards that are in Prizm.
But then I thought...with UD having an exclusive, maybe they will bring back the set that got me back into card collecting quite a few years ago...the set I enjoyed collecting with my kids more than any other set.

I hope UD brings back Mcdonald's cards!

UD won't bring back McDonald's cards. Tim Horton's is now an NHL sponsor.

Although, McDonald's had a large endorsement deal lined up with the NHL before last season. Bettman's lockout caused McDonald's to back out of that, and give the money to the NFL.

[joecoolio]

I agree with one of the earlier posts that having Panini around made Upper Deck better. However, I have not been impressed with Panini for the last year or so, so I am not really disappointed that they are gone. The big concern now is how many products Upper Deck will be allowed to make and how that will impact the market. As someone else mentioned, with MVP back, there are surely going to be more than 11 Upper Deck releases. I hope they remember the things they have been doing well and try to limit the release of unnecessary and unimaginative products so that we the collectors will enjoy this Upper Deck exclusive period. But chances are with the exclusive license we will see too many products released every year and products none of us have an interest in as well.

IMO, I think you can pretty much be guaranteed to see these products from UD this year(virtually almost released in this order!):

MVP
OPC
Artifacts
UD1
BD
ICE
Trilogy
SPx
UD2
SPGU
SPA
Ultimate
Cup

We also hope they will at least modify their 90 day rule!

[*censored*]

Upper Deck is terrified of going under. Topps has an exclusive on baseball, Panini on basketball, they had to make a splash with either football or hockey to have a chance at survival.

Custer's last stand came at the Little Bighorn. Upper Deck's comes at the NHL.

[egghead529]

Best part of that article is he says there will definitely be less products

[mortuus]

This is just disaster nothing else :( bah....

[RGM81]

So we already know that MVP and Ice are being brought back as a standalone product.

What else do you guys think Upper Deck will be doing again next year?

If there's one product I want to see revived, it's Hot Prospects.

[TheIronHorse4]

I would love seeing Hot Prospects make a come back, always a favorite product of mine. UD Ice and UD Black would be the other two I would be excited to see return.

As far as the exclusive goes, I'm not overly broken up about it. I'm not a Panini fan and will still have ITG products for something different. I'm going to buy what I like, and in the past it has typically been Upper Deck products. If the value's not there I won't buy it, pretty simple as far as my own stance on it goes.

So we already know that MVP and Ice are being brought back as a standalone product.

What else do you guys think Upper Deck will be doing again next year?

If there's one product I want to see revived, it's Hot Prospects.

[theboxbreaker96]

OPC Premier and Hot Prospects both need to be brought back. It will be very interesting to see what happens.

[Wickabee]

So we already know that MVP and Ice are being brought back as a standalone product.

What else do you guys think Upper Deck will be doing again next year?

If there's one product I want to see revived, it's Hot Prospects.

As long as Victory stays dead, I really don't care.

[centrehice]

Victory I hope, is a dead dog. What worthless cards. In 1999-00 and through 2003-04 it had some creativity, and some real hard inserts to find nowadays, not now, worse than 93-94 Junior Classics.