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The 1992 Upper Deck set was divided into two series, Lo-Series and Hi-Series. The bulk of the base set was in the Lo-Series (cards 1 - 700) while the last few cards were in the Hi-Series (cards 701-800). Also, each base card comes with two different types of holographic stamps - either silver if it came from a pack or gold if it came from a factory set.
In my case, I bought a box of Lo-Series packs - so everything you see below will be numbered somewhere between 1 and 700 and will have a silver holographic stamp on the back.
The box contains a whopping 36 packs with 15 cards per pack. That means at best you could pull 36 x 15 = 540 unique base cards in a single box (and that's ignoring any inserts). Luckily for base set collectors, 1992 Upper Deck doesn't have many inserts in the box. In fact, there are only two: holographic team logo stickers and Ted Williams Baseball Heroes cards.
Before moving to the inserts, let's first take a look at the base cards.
My box had rather poor collation. In total, I pulled 109 duplicates in my box to go along with another five triplicates. Obviously, that's no good at all - 114 base cards were duplicates (or worse) which means I ended up with only about 400 or so unique base cards in the box.
As for the inserts, collation wasn't any better.
I pulled a total of seven holographic team stickers - but of those seven stickers two teams were represented twice (Rockies and Expos).
I'm a huge fan of the holographic stickers and so I admit to being disappointed that I didn't get seven unique stickers. I was happy to land both the Reds sticker as well as the old school Astros logo sticker (of course, in 1992 that was the current Astros logo, only today is it considered old school)!
The second (and final) insert of the box was the rather cool Baseball Heroes set. In the Lo-Series, Ted Williams was the player of focus in set.
I ended up with seven Baseball Heroes cards but once again I had a duplicate (only one double however).
Overall, I give the 1992 Upper Deck Lo-Series Baseball box the following rating:
Set design: A
Collation: F
Opening Thrill: D
Overall: C-
The 1992 Upper Deck set is a great, classic design that I love a lot. The photography is interesting throughout the set - in fact, pretty much every pack I opened had at least one card that I considered "scan worthy" while many packs had two, three, or even more cards that could have been considered for scanning. Unfortunately, the excitement of opening each pack was muted because it was clear early on that I was pulling way too many doubles (sometimes even within the same pack). Couple that with also ending up with 3 duplicates out of a total of 14 inserts (stickers and Baseball Heroes combined) and it's tough to say that there was true excitement from opening each pack individually. All that said, I do love the set itself - but I don't think I can recommend someone buy a box if their only goal is to try and build the set!
In my case, I bought a box of Lo-Series packs - so everything you see below will be numbered somewhere between 1 and 700 and will have a silver holographic stamp on the back.
The box contains a whopping 36 packs with 15 cards per pack. That means at best you could pull 36 x 15 = 540 unique base cards in a single box (and that's ignoring any inserts). Luckily for base set collectors, 1992 Upper Deck doesn't have many inserts in the box. In fact, there are only two: holographic team logo stickers and Ted Williams Baseball Heroes cards.
Before moving to the inserts, let's first take a look at the base cards.
My box had rather poor collation. In total, I pulled 109 duplicates in my box to go along with another five triplicates. Obviously, that's no good at all - 114 base cards were duplicates (or worse) which means I ended up with only about 400 or so unique base cards in the box.
As for the inserts, collation wasn't any better.
I pulled a total of seven holographic team stickers - but of those seven stickers two teams were represented twice (Rockies and Expos).
I'm a huge fan of the holographic stickers and so I admit to being disappointed that I didn't get seven unique stickers. I was happy to land both the Reds sticker as well as the old school Astros logo sticker (of course, in 1992 that was the current Astros logo, only today is it considered old school)!
The second (and final) insert of the box was the rather cool Baseball Heroes set. In the Lo-Series, Ted Williams was the player of focus in set.
I ended up with seven Baseball Heroes cards but once again I had a duplicate (only one double however).
Overall, I give the 1992 Upper Deck Lo-Series Baseball box the following rating:
Set design: A
Collation: F
Opening Thrill: D
Overall: C-
The 1992 Upper Deck set is a great, classic design that I love a lot. The photography is interesting throughout the set - in fact, pretty much every pack I opened had at least one card that I considered "scan worthy" while many packs had two, three, or even more cards that could have been considered for scanning. Unfortunately, the excitement of opening each pack was muted because it was clear early on that I was pulling way too many doubles (sometimes even within the same pack). Couple that with also ending up with 3 duplicates out of a total of 14 inserts (stickers and Baseball Heroes combined) and it's tough to say that there was true excitement from opening each pack individually. All that said, I do love the set itself - but I don't think I can recommend someone buy a box if their only goal is to try and build the set!
Poor collation was a huge problem for a long time in the 80s and 90s, and I'm surprised it didn't turn more people off to collecting. That's why I really enjoyed Topps from around 1998-2003 as the collation was very good and you were often pretty much guaranteed a complete set from a jumbo or even hobby box.
ReplyDeleteGreat review of an older product! I remember buying this product back in the day. If you have duplicates of the multi exposure cards like the Canseco card early in the break, I would be interested in them. I putting together a new collection of cards of ones that I wish had then but got now.
ReplyDeleteEven though I have a factory set, for the few loose gold holograms elsewhere in my pages, I find it slightly heartbreaking to know there's a factory set out there that's been broken up.
ReplyDeleteYeah 80s/90s collation approaches what you'd expect for truly random cards. So basically 70% unique in a box of 540 seems to be the rule. That said though my experiences with Fleer have been much much better.
ReplyDelete