Is there anyone that collects the regular 1999-2000 Upper Deck set? Not the Black Diamond, and not the Encore… No, not the Gold Reserve, or the Hardcourt, or the HoloGrFX or Ionix (that takes care of letters G, H, I)…or the Legends, MVP, or Retro. And don’t forget Victory and Ultimate Victory and that doesn’t include three pre-season Jordan sets and two boxed sets! When we looked at the Topps Gold Label cards, we talked about the explosion of parallel sets as the year 2000 approached. But the sheer quantity of sets was exploding too. It was becoming overwhelming.
But here is 1999-00 Upper Deck, 360 cards divided into two 180-card series. And it looks like even Upper Deck didn’t care too much about the base cards as it started calling the Series II cards “Game Jersey Edition” and advertising on the boxes their regular and autographed game-used jersey cards. But if you could block out the noise, the parallels, the serial numbers…you could still enjoy plain, old 1999-00 Upper Deck and collect a large set representative of the NBA season, just like in “the before times” of card collecting.
The rookie cards in this set come in two different subsets. In Series I, you have the Rookie Class cards (#156-180) that came every 1:4 packs, so there is a little more value in the rookies than the other base cards. Series II contained Rookie Action cards (#316-360) at similar odds. And Upper Deck selected a variety of photos for the rookies, some action shots and some non-action photos like the press conference picture you see here on the #157 Steve Francis rookie card. The cards appear in draft pick order with their place in the draft shown small, in foil, outside the left edge of the border. Being the second pick in the draft, Steve Francis is the second rookie card appearing in the set. The design between the two rookie subsets is basically identical except the “Class” in “Rookie Class” is replaced with “Action” for the Series II rookie action cards. Apart from the design itself, the reverse of the rookie cards is very basic, containing only the classic bio info and stats.
Just a reminder that in the midst of the chaos of card collecting in 1999-2000, it’s still possible to collect a classic, simple set of cards!
You must be logged in to post a comment.