Welcome back MVP

I was always a fan of this set.  Back in the 90's it was a cheaper alternative to the myriad of other sets that were on the market, plus it had one of my favorite parallels ever, the silver signature parallel.

When I recently read that Upper Deck was going to resurrect MVP as a base brand again rather than an insert as it has been the past few years, I was happy.

Cheap cards, with a little something to chase, is right up my alley.

I bought a blaster while I was up in Canada during August, and when I amazingly spotted one in the card aisle today at Wal Mart, I quickly snapped it up.

The set consists of 300 cards, as it has in the past.  But now card #'s 201-300 are SPs, found 1:1 in hobby packs, 1:2 in retail/blasters.  That breakdown was a little disappointing, but not unexpected in today's SP driven card market.

The design is nice, although there may be a little too much border on the front for some people's tastes..

I think Upper Deck wanted to make sure that people knew that these cards were the MVP brand.  The logo/lettering appears twice on the front.

And twice more on the back customers are made aware that this is the MVP brand.  A little bit of overkill if you ask me.  Maybe a secondary photo on the back instead of the MVP logo would have enhanced these cards.

Also returning are my beloved silver script parallels.  I like the fact that they are distinguishable from the base set by the silver borders (along with the faux signature).  This blaster was very good to me, as I pulled 6 quality players.   This is probably going to be a chase set for me again, as I'm finally about to finish the 99-00 MVP silver sig set very shortly. 

Now, the blaster I bought in Canada netted me a Mikkel Boedker gold signature card.  I figured that I just got very lucky, since the gold signatures are #'d to 100.  Well, either I'm very lucky, or the gold signatures are in each blaster, because I pulled another one...

Love it.  Ryan O'Reilly, #'d 98/100.  In the past versions of MVP, I never pulled any gold signatures that I can recall.   Now 2 in 2 blasters?  Can my luck be changing that much?

Now this next insert I'm going to gush a little bit about...

The 3 stars of the week inserts are a fantastic idea in my opinion.  Not based on just guys who are young, or hot in the collecting world, these cards feature players that earned the 3 stars during a specific week during the NHL regular season.  

How many times are you going to see Taylor Hall, Semyon Varlamov and Max Pacioretty on a card together??  I don't recall seeing any kind of inserts like these in the past, and I'd love to see more of these in the future.  With 26 of these available (one for each week during the season), it's also an attainable insert set to put together.

MVP also has a colors and contours parallel set that is found in hobby packs that will drive team and player collectors a little more crazy as well. 

Sorry for the blurry image

No, I unfortunately don't have the Joe Sakic die-cut yet, but naturally as a Sakic collector I would love to have one for my PC.  A quick search of eBay shows that these have a bit of a wide price range so far; a lot of the commons going for about $2-$3, while a Bobby Orr purple die cut has a $40 BIN price tag on one auction that I found.

I'm hoping by the time the Hockey Expo in November rolls around that the price tag drops a bit, which I'm thinking it will since the 14-15 Upper Deck series 1 releases that week.

All in all, this has been a fun and inexpensive rip so far, and it just may replace my OPC chase this year.

thanks for reading, Robert