As the year 2000 approached, there was an explosion of parallel sets and number of sets in basketball card collecting. It was becoming overwhelming and the hobby was really changing. Does anyone collect regular 1999-2000 Upper Deck? Not Upper Deck Black Diamond, or Upper Deck Encore, or Gold Reserve, or Hardcourt, or HoloGrFX or Ionix, or Legends, or, MVP, or Retro. And don’t forget Upper Deck Victory and Ultimate Victory or the three pre-season Jordan sets! Did Upper Deck even care about the base cards? They began calling the Series II cards “Game Jersey Edition” and heavily promoted their game-used jersey cards on boxes. But if you could block out the noise, the parallels, the serial numbers, the sheer number of sets, you could still collect plain, old 1999-2000 Upper Deck and, if you did, this was one of the rookie cards you were chasing.
As you know from many of the other Lamar Odom cards we’ve looked at, the value didn’t hold up on this one. The 2001 Standard Catalog of Basketball Cards lists it at $20. Now you could probably remove that “0” from the $20.
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. Series II contained Rookie Action cards (#316-360) at similar odds. The design between the two subsets is basically identical except the “Class” in “Rookie Class” is replaced with “Action” for the Series II rookie action cards. Limiting the rookies to 1:4 packs is part of the reason that the rookies still maintain some value from this set. And Upper Deck selected a variety of photos for the rookies, some action shots and some non-action photos like press conference pictures. Both Steve Francis and Lamar Odom are shown at press conferences in their photos. The cards appear in draft pick order, making this Lamar Odom card the fourth rookie found in the set. Their place in the draft is shown small, in foil, outside the left edge of the border. The reverse of the rookie cards is very basic, containing only the classic bio info and stats.
I know we looked at the Steve Francis from this set, but since we looked at so many Lamar Odom rookie cards in our discussion about the risks of chasing rookies, I didn’t want to leave this set before looking at this particular card as well.
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