The series of UD portraits included in Upper Deck’s 2023-24 card set are downright bizarre.
Most hockey card photography follows a very simple formula. Get a good look at the player’s face, take some great action shots, and you’re good to go.
Sure, sometimes things can get a little more creative. It was probably taken by a photographer. Athlete on the beach wearing rollerblades or shoot some pools It’s for a more casual and fun vibe, but that’s about as wild as these things usually get.
However, there is a 2023-24 series of UD portrait series of Upper Deck hockey cards.
For some strange reason, the folks at Upper Deck created a series of hockey cards that recreated portraits of past players in Photoshop, with gold-plated frames as if the cards were on display in a museum. .
Canucks captain Quinn Hughes has one of the strangest cards in the series. His card shows him wearing a giant Elizabethan collar around his neck and writing hymns in his diary using a William Shakespeare-like quill.
Better be careful with fuses. He risks receiving a two-minute juvenile sentence for rough behavior.
Is there any logic to this depiction of Hughes? who knows? But the rest of the UD Portraits series is just as strange.
For example, Sidney Crosby is the very model of a modern major general…
…Jake Ettinger is the Fourth Musketeer…
…Mitch Marner is a man without shame…
Connor McDavid is the king, not to be confused with Elvis.
At least Senator Josh Norris makes some sense as a Roman centurion, and the Senators have used that image as their logo since their inception.
Honestly, this just scratches the surface of how weird these cards are. At the very least, there’s no denying that no one has a bigger rough than Quinn Hughes.
This is not how I expected airbrushing to return to hockey cards.
