My Unofficial Goodwin Champions PC Vol. 1: Older Hits

2009 Goodwin Champions Evelyn Ng Autograph..

After picking up things on COMC here & there over the years, it finally clicked with me sometime last year just how incredibly cheaply you can score a lot of great hits from Upper Deck's long-running Goodwin Champions brand.  Not only that, many of the subjects are hard (and usually much more expensive), if not impossible, to find anywhere else.

I've accumulated enough from the brand for it to almost qualify as a collection unto itself, and I am going to treat it as such here.  So strap in and enjoy.  This is the first in an at least five part series documenting everything I have scanned from the Upper Deck Goodwin Champions brand in my collection so far.

Most of what I've accumulated so far is from 2016 & 2017, but there are a few things from older sets, and that's what the first post will be about.  I know I have a blaster or two and a bunch of older base I won in a contest back in the day floating around here somewhere as well, but none of it seems to be scanned (or they died along with an old computer, I dunno which), so yeah, just the hits right now.

2012 Goodwin Champions Sonya Thomas Autograph..

Goodwin Champions started out as a baseball product in 2009 (the Evelyn Ng at the top of the post is from the OG set), essentially Upper Deck's answer to Topps' offbeat ultra old school brand Allen & Ginter.  It wasn't until UD lost their MLB license that it was eventually retooled into the even more offbeat than Allen & Ginter multi-sport/non-sport hybrid we know & mostly love today.

2011 Goodwin Champions Natalie Gulbis Relic..

I think I have an absolutely terrible looking Warren Moon relic from one of the earlier sets too, but I don't have a scan of it handy either.  This Natalie Gulbis from 2011 looks fantastic though!  She appears to radiating energy with the force of a thousand suns.

2013 Goodwin Champions Mimi Knoop Autograph..

I don't really collect any minis at all anymore (though I'm seriously considering a page of those magnificent Thor: Ragnarok minis you get out of the Dyson Cards), so I don't really have any from any year of Goodwin Champions to show.  They often have cooler and more diverse (& attainable, despite being technically rarer) parallels than A&G can usually muster, but very few, if any, mini inserts to offer.  They aren't typically one-per-pack either (usually 1:2-1:4, iirc). Win some, lose some.

2015 Goodwin Champions Miki Sudo autograph..

Closing out episode one with a trio of autos from 2015.  Like I said, I don't have a ton of pre-2016 stuff, but there will almost certainly be more in the future.  I'm especially fond of the design of these 2015's autos.

2015 Goodwin Champions Alana Beard Autograph..

Alana Beard is a name I knew, as is the final card in this episode (which is why I got them).  But for whatever reason, Goodwin Champions hits are exceptionally inexpensive.  The checklist is usually pretty quirky, but it's pretty much all on-card, and some years you aren't even guaranteed an auto in every box.  Crazy.  I think the Evelyn Ng up top might've been around $5, but I don't think anything in the rest in this post cost me over $2.

2015 Goodwin Champions "Ironman" Ivan Stewart Inscribed Autograph #'ed 4/298..

Much like A&G, you don't tend to find a whole lot of numbered stuff in Goodwin Champions, but a lot of it will be hand-numbered when you do.  The inscribed autos are usually much rarer (often /50 or less), but some signers just naturally have the inscription as part of their signature, and most of them get counted as count as part of the Inscription parallel.  I have two others like this numbered much higher in later episodes, and also a couple of the normal, much rarer variety.

That's it for part one.  I hope to be able to open a box myself someday, but they are typically well out of my price range.  I'm going to keep getting singles whenever I can though.  Thanks for stopping by!

Until our next...