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:
