I have commented on numerous occasions how great it would have been to get signed base versions of the Upper Deck masterpieces cards that were featured in baseball and football from 2007-2008. Over on iamjoecollector, Jeff has highlighted an auction of a card that I think examplifies this fact more than I could ever imagine.

This card features one of the flashback cards of Dick Butkus and Adrian Peterson, hand signed by both players. As far as I can tell, it looks legit. Even if it werent real, it shows how much Upper Deck left on the table by not going for an on card element with this set. The card looks tremendous, and it isnt even one of the better ones of the set. The masterpieces set was beyond underrated because of how great the base cards were for the product, and personally, I would never hesitate to buy box after box of this stuff if Upper Deck had gone in the direction that everyone wanted them to.

Basketball was different than the baseball and football versions because Upper Deck offered hard signed Masterpieces cards in their Chronology set, something that I know a lot of collectors chased upon the release of the set. Its really unfortunate that the basketball set was the only autographed eidtion of Masterpieces as the brand was cancelled in 2009 completely. Even though Topps tried and EPICALLY failed to recreate the visiual success of Masterpieces with the horribly ugly National Chicle set for both sports, nothing has lived up to how great these cards looked.

I have also said before that using a painted look for the cards always looks great as a visual tool in creating a product, and I am sad that it is not used more often. Panini had a lot of success with it in 2008 with their version of National Treasures, but also did a poor job using a similar tactics in 2009. Unlike those two sets, many of the Masterpieces cards werent drafted using a photoshop filter, but instead had real paintings that were turned into the cards. Said paintings for some of the base cards were then sold on Upper Deck’s website, and that was the last we saw of anything Masterpieces.

Overall, I think that if someone wanted to promote a higher end product using a lot of the elements that made Masterpieces look the way it did, it would be pretty successful only if done correctly. One of the reasons that Masterpieces failed the way it did was because of box setup, only offering autographed content in the form of ugly subset cards. If a company could figure out how to include well painted cards with high end elements like patches and autographs, the success of the product could far eclipse what Upper Deck tried with their version. Plus, I would be quite eager to chase my favorite players as long as no stickers were there to ruin the look.