These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

I have seen a lot of nice things happening over the last six months, too bad they have been overshadowed by all the bad things. I just wanted to showcase a few things that I liked over the time I have been writing, and I think a lot would agree with me.

1. The resurgence of ON CARD AUTOS - YES! This is awesome to the tenth power. Finally some companies have gotten their shit together enough that even smaller sets are getting on card sigs. How is it done? Well, you produce the cards WELL before the release date so you can get them out to the players. Then you require them back before you pack out the cards. Its really a nice concept. I would especially like to highlight SPA and Exquisite of last year because both were completely on card. Exquisite is expected as such, but SPA is a mid end product. DLP, take note.

2. Measures against the patch faking douchebags - This time I have to give a hearty handshake to DLP for starting the process with getting these things going. Its not perfect yet, but it IS getting better. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a standard.

3. Painted "like" cards - I love UD Masterpieces, Allen and Ginter and the Gridiron Kings subsets. These cards are beautiful and really present a cool idea in a way that everyone can appreciate. I think that these cards are really done well in the fact that it focuses more on the piece itself rather than some gimmick. Thank you to the artists behind these cards. I also would like to suggest that maybe "sketch" cards would be a good idea as it would be cool to see how the best sports aritists in the game do their paintings/drawings. Basically, lets get more than Dick Perez involved.

4. The changing of redemption replacement procedures - I know, it hasn’t happened yet, but I assume it will be soon. UD has announced that users will be allowed to pick from a number of cards to replace the unmade or unfufilled redemption they have received. I like this ideas because I would be super pissed if I got crap for my cool card. In the future, lets hope that people wont have to go through this process at all, but that is a pipe dream, I understand.

5. Nice patches in every parallel instead of 1/1s- I know this can be good and bad, but I assume its mostly good. We saw that in SPA football and National Treasures, anything was possible. It used to be a 1/1 when a patch was amazing, but this time, its for everyone. Even the cards out of 225 had some really nice pieces, and although it provided fodder for the people mentioned in number two, it was a welcome addition. Lets hope this continues.*

6. DLP's language on the back of their jersey cards - see here.

*Yes, I do realize that a lot of cards were shafted this year in terms of 1 color patches on high end cards, but lets be honest, that was nothing new.

Im sure that a lot of stuff has caught your eye, so please feel free to post below if you want. This is the stuff that I liked and wanted to continue. I wont post what I didn’t like, because, well, that is way too long of a post and you have heard it all before. I know the card manufacturers are watching, so please take this stuff into consideration. I have questioned whether the companies actually know what we want, but in some respects, we are getting some stuff.