2009 Goodwin Champions Night Variations

While going through hours of debate, and never even posting or letting anyone know I was working on it, I compared and contrasted the popular vintage sets of 2009 - UD Goodwin Champions, Topps Allen & Ginter's, Topps T206 and UD Goudey. It was very easy for me to decide my favorite, which was far & away Allen & Ginter's. I hated Goudey, enjoyed T206 greatly and remained incredibly frustrated with my awful pulls in Goodwin Champions...but knew that the potential was there for them to be great.

Researching Goodwin on eBay showed me some slick pulls - on card autos featuring Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter, and, well that's about it. The Memorobilia Series is dreadful, bad swatches of either white or gray jerseys, no patches, poor checklist.

But when it came to variations, Goodwin got my attention, and still does. Why? The Nighttime variations. These cards are amazing. It's kind of lame that all 15 in the set (why not all cards, and why not on mini's?) have the same background, but still, these are art. It's a refreshing change of pace from bleached-out daytime photography of most sets (I'm looking at you, Topps flagship).

However, I still have questions about these nighttime variations. I thought all of the cards in the GC set had Night parallels, and I was wrong. I snagged a checklist off of Collector's Universe forums, a site which I do not frequent, but just happened to come up in a Google search. (Google doesn't show up underlined in red, is it already a true "word"?)

Here's the '09 Checklist:

1 Ken Griffey Jr.
7 Ryne Sandberg
20 Grady Sizemore
44 Barack Obama
56 Ozzie Smith
65 Tiger Woods
69 Ichiro
74 Gerry Lopez
87 Andy Pettitte
101 Cal Ripken Jr.
106 Ryan Howard
115 Smarty Jones
126 Troy Tulowitzki
132 Chien-Ming Wang
140 Gordie Howe

They picked some solid gamers here. So far I have only seen evidence of a few of these - Wang, Tulo, Ripken, Pettitte, Ichiro, Tiger, Barack. I am debating if I want to put forth the capitol to chase these 15 cards. The only reason for this desire, other than the sleek look of the cards, is that the checklist has some of my favorites - Tulowitzki, Griffey Jr, Wang and Ichiro. Maybe I'll just chase those, but I've seen no evidence of a Griffey, yet.

Oh, and if you think I should write up a post or series of posts on the Vintage Wars as I like to call them (the Goodwin Champions vs. Goudey vs. Allen & Ginter's vs. T206) I will do so. Anyting for the...fans?