2007 Upper Deck Masterpieces box break

If it feels like I’ve been AWOL for a long time here, let me assure you that it’s not due to lack of interest or stories to tell. In fact, the past week has been an utter whirlwind leading up to and including a super intense two day music video shoot for our new best friend and future pop star Trixie Fender! Check out her site and direct your 16-19 year old daughters there as well- the video we shot will be up by mid-May to coincide with a record release. She’s a super nice and hard-working musician, and I look forward to following her career to see how this whole music business works these days. My background is in punk rock music videos so this world is all new to me!

Okay, enough about my personal/professional life, let’s get to my hobby life! Despite our hectic schedules, Jon and I found some much-needed and -appreciated time to open a couple of older boxes. After some discussion in the comments of The MojoBeard Conglomorate, LLC, we decided to stay away from 2009 and 2010 releases due to the utter lack of value and relative lack of fun in those products. So, in honor of the start of the 2010 baseball season and in the spirit of celebrating a couple of young players with hot starts, we opened the opening with some 2007 UD Masterpieces. This is a product that Jon and I have had some interest in for a while, especially after seeing what looked like some decent GU that Beardy got in a trade. So, did we get a Lincecum rookie? Was our autograph truly a Masterpiece? Let’s find out, shall we?

Some friends of mine and I run a movie review site called Nine Words Or Less and, in the spirit of that style of reviewing, I’ll just say this: Beautiful cards, on-card autos… but why the parallels?! To delve in a little deeper, I’ll add that the parallels are hilariously-named. Which is great for a joke, but not so great when trying to figure out which shade of Blue Steel you have. We got lucky and hit a nice player in a low-numbered parallel. We got not so lucky on our auto. But boy would I love to put a base set + GU + Auto set of this stuff. It would look fantastic in a binder. Of course, some of the big names are commanding big prices in the auto realm so it’s way out of my range, but these boxes are pretty cheap if you don’t mind hitting a powerfully weak auto 9 times out of 10. Plus there’s the allure of the Lincecum, but he had like 3000 RCs and pre-RCs so that’s not a real draw. The bottom line is that I like this product and would love to collect it, but the chances of completing anything resembling a master(piece, ha!) set are nil so I don’t think I’ll be getting another box of this. I can’t imagine having paid full retail for this box… I think they started at like $80/box or something crazy like that. Not nearly enough value for that price, but at the ~$50 level, I can at least say it was fun! And as on-card autos become more and more rare, products I’m actually interested in opening command something of a premium.

We’ve got one more retro box break (yes, we know 2007 isn’t retro, it’s a joke) and then we’ll be on the hunt for more fun older >$50 boxes with on-card autos to break- feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments! I’m also interested to hear what other folks in the blogo-whatsit have to say about Masterpieces since Jon and I were out of the game during its heyday. Drop us a line!