Cristiano Ronaldo Signs For SportKings

Apparently C. Ronaldo has signed for card maker, SportKings Trading Cards. His hard-signed (read on-card) autographs will feature in SK's upcoming Series F product. All of CR7's Upper Deck autos were signed on a sticker. Therefore this marks the first time his certified, on-card, signature will appear on a trading card. To be honest I'm not a fan of the design of SportKings cards, seeing as how they're not licensed they tend to be rather ugly looking but on the plus side I'm confident in their authenticity since this company has a solid record unlike other shady manufacturers out there...

You can read further details straight from the horse's mouth - Dr. Brian Price, president of the Sportkings brand - by clicking here.

Beware Of Fake Autographs On eBay

Originally posted on 18 June 2012.

Check out this horrible, 2010 Upper Deck World of Sports fake David Beckham auto I came across on eBay. There's so many things wrong with this shitty attempt at Beckham's signature that it's not even funny. First of all the signature is nowhere near a genuine Becks sig, see below for the authentic UD Man Utd example.

Second of all notice how the "World of Sports" lettering is red on these un-signed base cards pictured below of Beckham and Thierry Henry. There were autographed parallels of these base cards but those had a guarantee of authenticity on the back and the visible difference of "World of Sports" text in blue, as can be seen further down.

The actual certified parallel autos from this set have the aforementioned blue lettering and the sticker auto such as Pablo Mastroeni and Beckham himself who does have an autographed parallel although it does not actually feature his signature on the sticker but rather that of former MLSer Luciano Emílio. See this link for more info on that particular error auto.

Sadly it appears some bidders have fallen for the fast one this unscrupulous seller (ondeckcrds) is trying to pull.

2002 Panini World Cup (Japanese Edition) 5 Box Break

Originally posted on 22 May 2012.

I recently picked up several boxes of this older Panini World Cup collection and as you can see from this side of the box picture (click on the image to enlarge) this is the more rare and complete Japanese version of the product which has a deeper checklist than it's counterpart released in Europe and around the rest of the World.

Also of particular interest is that this Japanese set had product exclusive autograph cards of 12 different players with a print run of 100 each, see checklist below.
A1 Ronaldo - Brazil /100
A2 Lilian Thuram - France /100
A3 Igor Tudor - Croatia /100
A4 Gianluigi Buffon - Italy /100
A5 Paolo Maldini - Italy /100
A6 Francesco Totti - Italy /100
A7 Christian Vieri - Italy /100
A8 Nakata Hidetoshi - Japan /100
A9 Ono Shinji - Japan /100
A10 Yanagisawa Atsushi - Japan /100
A11 Rui Costa - Portugal /100
A12 Álvaro Recoba - Uruguay /100

- Check this thread over on FCF (Football Cards Forum) for the complete collection checklist. -

So I busted 5 of these boxes over the last 3 days hopeful of pulling an auto but realizing that with only 1,200 signed cards to be found it was probably going to be quite unlikely. I'm guessing the majority have already been pulled and are now tucked away in collector's private collections. With that in mind I would settle for completing as much of the rest of the master set which includes two other chase card sets to collect, 'Flag Player' foil inserts and 'Japan National Team Players' special cards.
Now on to the results:

Box 1 - From this first box the "hits" I pulled were a F12 Augustine "Jay-Jay" Okocha, F13 José Luis Chilavert and J1, J2, J3 & J23 Japanese player inserts.

Box 2 - This box produced F1 Émile, F19 Álvaro Recoba, F20 Earnie Stewart, J5, J7, J11 and J12.

Box 3 - From this one I got F4 Jon Dahl Tomasson, F5 Oliver Kahn, F6 Zinedine Zidane, J7, J11 and J12. Curiously all of the 'J' inserts in this box were duplicates from the last box, poor collation...

Box 4 - This box was definitely the most productive. To my pleasant surprise it was quite loaded with some packs even contaning 2 hits! Which were F8 Francesco Totti, F9 Nakata Hidetoshi, F10 Hong Myung-Bo, F11 Juan Francisco Palencia, J18, J19, J20, J21 and J22.

Box 5 - Unfortunately in this box all of the hits, save for one 'J' insert, were dupes that I had pulled in earlier boxes. F5 Kahn, F6 Zidane, J7, J9, J11 and J12.

Update - I ended up opening up a 6th box in hopes of getting closer to completing the inserts sets but alas no luck. All of the hits were dupes, in fact this box #6 was almost the same as box #4. As for the hits, F9 Nakata, F10 Hong, F11 Palencia, J20, J21 and J22.

Here are the scans of the hits from the entire bust. Notice at the bottom the Roberto Baggio and Eto'o base cards, these were probably the biggest names to be entirely omitted from the European release that were included in this Japanese edition.
Hope yous all enjoyed the pics and break, overall I have to say it was very enjoyable for me. It's a solid product and I'd like Panini to make more like it.