Cyber Monday Deal: 2011 UD College Football Legends

It's hard to resist the Black Friday and Cyber Monday card deals.  My site of choice is Dave and Adam's Card World.  I manage to make it through Black Friday with all of my money, but I couldn't take it anymore when one of the Cyber Monday deals came out. 

That was 5 Mondays ago.  It's appropriate to post some college cards with the National Championship tonight.  My prediction: FSU wins 32-24.  I think that happens when FSU is up 32-17 in the final minute and Auburn scores to make it 32-24.  FSU recovers the onside kick. Game over.

I picked up 6 boxes of 2011 Upper Deck College Football Legends.  It's a product I almost bought on Black Friday in 2012 and at several times in 2013. 

It's a great looking set with a lot of great autos, all of which are on-card.  There's potential for some huge hits in this product.  The base cards are modeled after the original 1997 Legends set.  The regular autos are the same as the base cards, except the finish is matte instead of glossy to hold the auto better. There are three insert sets: All-Americans, Bowl Game Heroes, and Decade's Best...all of which have auto versions.  There's also an inscriptions auto insert, and they included buybacks of autos found in the original 1997 Legends set. 

Here is a base card of Antonio Freeman, the only Hokie in the set:

The bottom didn't scan very well, so I didn't scan the rest of the base set.  They are simple, but still pretty nice.  There are a lot of good photos.  I'm getting a new scanner soon, and I may play with the settings to see if I can get better scans to post. 

The backs have blurbs about the players' time at their schools.

Here is an example of the All-American set:

In my opinion, these are absolutely beautiful.  I think it may be the perfect All-American set.  The auto versions are amazing. 

The backs are nice as well.

The Bowl Game Heroes set highlights a great bowl performance by the player:

With a brief description of the performance on the back. The foil on the front clutters the card on the auto versions.

Lastly, the Decade's best features players from the 1950s to the 2000s:

It's pretty easy to see that the auto versions of these are beautiful.

I'm not going to show everything from the boxes in this post, as I want to spread it out over several posts. 

However, I do want alert you to some of the best collation I have ever experienced. 

In 6 boxes with 20 5-card packs each, I was supposed to end up with 600 cards.  I ended up with exactly 600 cards as every pack had exactly 5 cards. 

Every pack tends to have one insert or auto, so you can expect 4 base cards per pack.

The expected outcome for 6 boxes is 480 base cards, 102 inserts, and 18 autos.

I ended up with 478 base cards, 102 inserts, and 20 autos.  Bonus autos are always nice. 

Best case scenario with the base cards is to get 4 complete 100-card sets.  I got all 4 complete sets.  The remaining 78 cards consisted of 58/100 of a 5th set and 20/100 of a 6th set.  I'll take that any day.

I'm keeping one set, but the other three are up for trade or sale if you are interested.

As for the inserts, AA is 35 cards, BGH is 25 cards, and DB is 40 cards.  That's 100 cards.  I got 102 inserts, so I figured I'd have a bunch of dupes.  Amazingly, I got 34/35, 25/25, and 39/40.  I got 98 unique insert cards and only 4 dupes. That's incredible.  I'm absolutely thrilled.

I'll have several more posts coming this week where I'll show more of the cards.