This card is numbered to 50, and I did pull it from a ten cent box, so it was only a dime. This would have been an awesome card in like 1997. But it's 2010 now, and nobody wants a gem like this. What a shame. I don't want it either, which is why I'm trying to get $1 for it on eBay. Actually, I'm conducting a little experiment to see what will sell on eBay from a dime box. I want to see if show dealers could maybe do a little better with a little thought. So far, answer seems to be "not really."UD Masterpieces was a failure. It's a beautiful set, for sure, but it didn't hold up well over time. The main problem for this, and many UD sets, is simply that the hits weren't very nice. Upper Deck could have had some beautiful dual autos in this set of Hall of Famers, but instead they chose to make this set filled with current players instead, which really hurt the set, since you have a choice of any available set on the market to pick those players up. This can easily be seen from the available cards on eBay. What's there that you want to pick up? Not a whole lot. Are you going to pay $200+ for a Mauer auto? No. When you break a box of this, you're guaranteed to lose money, especially when you're forced to put the parallels in the dime box.
The fact that this product failed is a testament to how poorly managed card companies are. Product design can be (and often is) really amazing. This set would be amazing if autographed. What would parallel autos fetch, particularly if a part of the card were cleared out for thin blue ink? It would have been the most highly collected set of 2007, and boxes would have routinely sold today for at least close to MSRP. But instead, the autos were converted to parallels; the other hits were made into single jerseys, and collectors had to hope for 1/1s or press plates to break even.
DIME BOX WISDOM: When products like these fail, the parallels fail too, and that's where this Hafner stands.
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