1991-92 Ultimate Draft Picks
Ultimate's first and only draft set is one of the worst sets of hockey cards I've ever seen. If you bring players together specifically for a photo shoot, wouldn't you want to make sure that you actually get a good photo of each player instead of this?
With 90 cards, but only 53 players, there are lots of repeats and lots of poorly thought out cards such as their black and white portrait shots that only have the Ultimate logo on the back and can only be described as "gay". And I don't understand why all the players are wearing jerseys that say "Smokey's." Is that a restaurant?
As for the "investment quality" of this set (which was "extremely limited" to only 150,000 sets), I think it cost $5 back in '92, and now you can't even get a dollar for it on Ebay.
Four cards:
#39 - Frederick Lundquist - This guy was not at the regular photo shoot.
#58 - Pat Falloon - If all the cards in the set were like this one, it may have been okay.
#90 - Face the Future - Whose face is it? At least they remembered to put their company logo on the back again.
#89 - Overview - A company that makes a draft set shouldn't make mistakes like calling the QMJHL the "Quebec Montreal Junior Hockey League" on the back. It wouldn't take a lot of research to find out that the 'M' stands for 'Major'.
1990-91 7th Inning Sketch WHL
7th Inning Sketch released the most comprehensive junior sets ever made. In 91-92 they released a set for each of the three CHL hockey leagues with between 268 and 400 cards per set. Because their sets are so thorough you get cards of a lot of players who didn't make it in the NHL.
This set is definitely lower quality than most of the NHL sets (maybe not lower than Pro-Set), but they did a good job of keeping the design simple. Like Pro-Set 90-91, 7th Inning Sketch includes coach cards, and they even step it up a notch with a few arena cards. I don't want to speak to soon, but I'm pretty sure no other company has made cards for arenas. It's just dumb enough to be awesome.
I only have the first 99 cards of this set, so I can't really do my five favorite for the whole set, but here are a few of the best from the first third of the set:
#19 - Cory Schwab - Even in budget sets, horizontal goalies cards always rule.
#83 - Richard Matvichuk - It's the same photo that's on the card in Classic's draft set (see last post)! He does get a different photo for the back.
#57 - Joel Dyck - This guy is a good example of the kind of players you get in this set. Joel Dyck never made the NHL; he has spent most of his professional hockey career playing for the Nippon Paper Cranes in the Asia League. He also played for the Calgary Rad'z in the far too short lived RHI (Roller Hockey International).
#93 - Saskatchewan Place - This arena card has trivia on the back! The answer is 'a'.
4 comments:
Nice post! I appreciate that the arena cards have "A" in the star where positions are normally listed. Very nice.
that's awesome. i didn't even notice that!
Hey, great blog man! I'm writing from Gothenburgh, Sweden.
About your noticed card 1991-92 Ultimate Draft Picks Frederik Lindquist, his name really spells Fredrik, not Frederick as on the trading card. LOL
He has since then changed his surname for some reason so he's now known as: Fredrik Bremberg, and participated in this years World Championships for Team Sweden.
I can only recall one other set that did arena photography, and that was the 1989-90 Panini Hockey Sticker set. The set featured a sticker of each arena for each NHL team--and some of the photos were quite stunning, especially Madison Square Garden, St. Louis Arena and Chicago Stadium (you'd never know the Stadium was in the middle of a ghetto from that nice photo).
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