UD Black

Nice card, huh? I'll never own it. How about you? I'm not really sure what to make of this release. Going by the checklist at Upper Deck's site, I can come up with three White Sox players throughout every variation.

1. Paul Konerko
2. Jim Thome
3. Ryan Sweeney

As to how they are placed in the release, I couldn't begin to tell you. The mystery starts with Paul Konerko. His base card should be #9, but there isn't a #9 listed in the base cards. It goes from #8, Derrek Lee to #10, Adam Dunn. There is no #9.

Yet, there are parallels of Konerko's #9 card. This may be a mistake, but eBay is not showing very many Konerko cards from this set, so who knows. I think I'm getting a headache.

Jim Thome seems to only pop up in autograph subsets and something called Pure that is numbered 1/1. Madness I tell you, pure madness! I wish I could make more sense out of some of these subsets and parallels. It would probably help more if Upper Deck had at least one example for each subset and parallel.

Ryan Sweeney pops up in a Pride of a Nation subset. I'm not really sure why he's in there. I would have picked Josh Fields as the White Sox rookie who is more deserving, but I don't make the cards, I just covet them.

The best I can hope for in obtaining any of these cards is a cheap eBay auction. I think one of the autograph cards that isn't ridiculously low numbered might be the easiest to pick up. The cards themselves are beautiful. They are slightly out of my price range. When a box gets into the hundreds of dollars for 2 packs with 1 card in each of those packs, those two cards had better be something I want.

The potential for a huge hit is there, but for a niche collector like me, the risk is not worth it. I might get a spectacular pull that I could sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, but I might not. I'm not in a comfortable enough tax bracket to take the risk. I wish I was, but I'm not. Maybe someday I will be. I think the average collector is in the same boat. The cards are nice to dream about though.