With 09-10, Let's reflect upon 08-09!

[TRDouble]

I don't buy boxes of high-end stuff; only items I can pick up from it off of eBay. Last season, I picked up:

- Masterpiece Legends
- Fleer Ultra
- O Pee Chee (some here & there)
- Artifacts
- UD Series 1
- UD Series 2
- Montreal Centennial
- SP Authentic
- Between The Pipes

I always love Between The Pipes and I probably should have picked up Heroes & Prospects, which I really liked the look of last year. I love ITG product and I always do well with it!

I thought Upper Deck laid an egg overall with hockey last year. Masterpiece Legends was a nice start, O Pee Chee was much improved from the year before, and by the end of the year, I thought SPA was well done. The Montreal Centennial set is an example of what Upper Deck can really do when they put some effort behind their product. That is probably my favorite set of 08/09. Overall, I thought the lower end UD stuff was just blah. Some of my favorite pulls were:

BTP Super-Sized Pads Grant Fuhr - that made up for the lack of Ryan Miller in the set.

BTP Complete Jersey Steve Mason - my first complete jersey!

Masterpiece Legends - Jean Beliveau auto! I love the legends type stuff.

Montreal Centennial - from tins (which is all I could get around these parts), I pulled autos of Koivu, Lafleur, Rogatien and Youppi!, plus a few jerseys. That added to a great set.

Some of my Artifacts cards were pretty good -- Treasured Swatches Luongo, Frozen Tundra Erik Staal, Auto-Facts Tuukka Rask, as were my purchased BAP Signature Sabres cards, which included a nice surprise in Teppo Numminen.

Some of the designs are looking nicer this year, so I am hoping it's a better year from the UD camp (their exclusive license is about to expire, so I expect a good showing, since they really need to keep it after losing the NBA (Panini) and MLB (Topps)).

[Pata93]

My favorites from last year:

5- UD Black Rookie Lettermen. I always like the SPGU Lettermarks so I think that was a great idea to create the same thing for rookies...

4- SPx Spectrum Jersey Patch. Great idea to put a patch instead of two jerseys. Some of those patches were really really sick...

3- The Cup Rookie Draft Board. Original and great looking...

2- Ultimate Shields. Both regular and rookies.

1- UD Ice Auto Patch Variation. Lot of sweet patches, loved the design!

[Prime B]

My favorites in no particular order:

- UD Black in general with a tip of the cap to these subsets: Lustrous Materials, Pride of a Nation, Quad Auto Patches and Game Night Tickets

- ITG Ultimate Triple Logos. Those cards were just filthy, limited to 4, and had unreal swatches for 3 tiny windows.

- Cup Dual Shields. I thought the design was good but most importantly they did blue sharpie on the white background instead of that horrid-looking silver on dull gray in 07-08, man those looked awful.

- ITG Ultimate Stick Racks. Again, some ridiculous slabs of wood (or composite) on these babies.

- ITG Heroes & Prospects Heroes Memorabilia Autographs. Some TOUGH signers (Forsberg, Sundin), limited to 9 and a clean design.

- ITG BTP Super Size Pads. Wow, just WOW!

- Champs Mini Autographs. Nice looking cards with a crisp auto on each.

- Cup Limited Logos. These were awesome looking this year, maybe my favorite design yet.