Worst of the Worst 2004-2009 #5 - 2007 Upper Deck Ultimate Collection

Over the last five years, there have been quite a few products that havent lived up to billing. Whether its shorted hits, bad design, or lack of content in a box, there were more than I can count. Today I want to start my countdown of the worst of the worst, and go into a little of what makes them so bad. Of course, for some, the shittiness extends beyond mere words, but ill at least try to capture it with each post. Ill do one per day, five total, and it will also allow for each of you to get your comments in.

Ill start with the fifth worst product of the last five years, 2007 Upper Deck Ultimate Collection. If you arent familiar with how bad this set really was, consider yourself lucky. Really, when you look at what Ultimate Collection brings to the table each year, it has really gotten fairly stale and over priced ever since memorabilia cards lost their overall value. 2007 was supposed to be the beginning of a new product configuration, and instead all we got was one of the biggest design and content cop outs in history.

First, this product was doomed from the beginning because of all of the added signatures that would be needed for it to be completed. Upper Deck touted throughout the card year that Ultimate would have much more added content, which got people talking that the packs could actually be bought at their intended $100 MSRP and still be worth it. Unfortunately, they were dead wrong. The packs contained a couple extra hits, though most of them turned out to be less than adequate players featured on horrible looking cards.

Instead of going through and designing extra subsets with better looking designs, Upper Deck instead decided to reuse the same template for the cards in each and every one. Outside of the normal draw, the rookie signatures, this product was filled with cookie cutter-ed crap meant to fill the other packs in the box. Each of the non-rookie autographs (3 per box) were cheap sticker autos on this template under different names. Many times, collectors who bought multiple boxes would get the same guy over and over again, but with a different title on the card. Players like Adrian Peterson were included in these subsets, but that type of pull was so rare that many just gave up on buying boxes, with many giving up on buying cases. It was so bad, that UD switched the format once again, this time coming out with better looking cards, but in a much different formatting style. Thanks to the abomination in 2007, Ultimate Collection was almost axed in 2008, even after the format change. Its kind of like Batman and Robin's effect on the career of the people in the movie.

Here is a few pics of the different cards from the set, notice the similarities. There are other autos, but most were a Panini-like busy mess like this. Then when you think a box of this cost almost 400 dollars in some shops upon release, it becomes clear why this is one of the worst products of the last five years.