Hobby Musings: Goodwin Champions with Tony Sirianni – Interview
Hobby Musings: Goodwin Champions with Tony Sirianni – Interview Transcript
Editor’s Note: Some text has been altered from original audio for clarity.
KS: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Hobby Musings. I’m Kelsey Schroyer, joined today by Upper Deck‘s Tony Sirianni, product manager for the upcoming Goodwin Champions release. Tony, thank you for joining us today.
TS: Yeah, thanks for having me, Kelsey.
KS: Big product for Upper Deck, arguably a legacy brand. What are some of the highlights collectors can expect from this year’s release?
TS: Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. We know this one is super late. Everyone’s been eagerly anticipating the next release of Goodwin, and we’re finally getting caught up here. So, yeah, we’ve been waiting for this one for a while. The variety of content is as eclectic as ever, but also the checklist is probably one of the strongest we’ve put out to date with just a variety of different athletes, prospects, rookies, Hall of Famers. We really have quite a mix of names here that we’ll get into a little bit more, but I think just that the mix of the autograph chase, along with the variety of unique relics, as usual, are going to be a fun rip for collectors once they start discovering it and opening the product.
KS: This is a product that’s been in place for well over a decade at this point. How do you think this one stands out from previous Goodwin releases?
TS: That’s a great question. I think that we’ve slowly modernized the brand over recent years. Again, just going back to its origins, it had a very tobacco-era kind of feel. A lot of vintage-looking designs, a lot of painted effects and actual painted images of the athletes. So, it’s slowly become more modernized, but I think the new modern look, the new sort of our platinum cards that are in the mix, our other brands have made their way over, like, we’ve had Exquisite in there for a few years. I think the variety is really the key. It’s just a fun break. You never know what you’re going to find, and from top to bottom, there’s just a ton of good stuff you can pull between autographs, jumbo relics, some other historical items that we’ve put in there. So, yeah, we’ll dive into it more, but I just think the variety is really what helps it stand apart, for sure.
KS: No, most definitely. I know I’ve gotten a chuckle seeing some of the subjects you’ve had over the past couple of years. Box configuration for this has normally been, I believe, at least three hits per box over a variety of hits. How do the hits fall this year per box?
TS: So, you’re going to get at least two hits per box. There has been a slight change to it. Again, as we modernize the brand, we’ve tried to increase the quality of content, the quality of hits. So, you’re still going to get your two hits at least. You still have a chance at a third, but there’s also a variety of other content we’ve included, like our new platinum inserts I mentioned. There’s a variety of parallels that you can chase. Those were introduced in 2021 and they were met with some pretty positive feedback, but we’ve expanded that. We’ve improved the look, the feel of those cards. We’ve added some additional parallel chase. So, I think those offset some of the other more ancillary inserts you may have found in the past. I think that we’ve tightened things up, and the content is a lot stronger from top to bottom.
KS: You touched on this a little bit in terms of the checklist. Goodwin has arguably Upper Deck’s most eclectic checklist every year, featuring some of the well-known UD spokesmen like Michael Jordan. It also has athletes and non-athletes that may not be as familiar. Who are some of the people we’ll see in this year’s checklist that are different, and how do you decide on who to include?
TS: I mean, a lot of credit goes to our coordinating team that really builds the checklist, goes out and sources the names and figures out who collectors are going to want again a year, two years in advance. You mentioned it. You’ve got your Jordans, you’ve got your Tigers, kind of the long-standing spokespeople and kind of big chase names. But I mean, from the world of baseball, we have Marcelo Mayer, we have Henry Davis, we have Cristian Hernandez. There’s quite a variety of prospects. Henry Davis has just debuted. He’s off to a great start in the MLB. We’ve got huge basketball names. Again, this is a 22 set, so keep in mind we have rookies in there like Jabari Smith who is in the 22 class, but we also have a variety of names that are coming up in this week’s NBA draft.
We have the Thompson twins in there. We have Scoot Henderson, Brandon Miller. So, you’re talking like potentially all top-ten picks or at least top-15 picks. You have a variety of basketball names. You go into football. Again, being a 22 brand, we have a variety of 22 rookies in there like your Kenny Pickets of the world, but we also have 23 rookies and prospects coming in. So you’ve got your C.J. Strouds, your Bryce Youngs. Even going further, we have Caleb Williams who’s going to be a top pick in next year’s NFL draft. So, you’ve got rookies, prospects and upcoming draftees. It’s loaded up with the prospect potential. We have other Hall of Famers in there, like Maria Sharapova. Quite a variety of names in here this year, so I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for collectors to find from a variety of sports, and there’s always some other fun names outside of the world of sports that I’m excited for you guys to discover, but for the most part, this thing is heavily loaded with prospects and top rookies across all sports.
KS: Something that’s become pretty popular with Upper Deck products in the last couple of years has been the bounty programs. The bounty missions. Goodwin is no exception. What more can you tell us about the bounty mission for this Goodwin product?
TS: Yeah, so we do have another bounty. We’ve tied those to our 3D Lenticular cards, which again. talking about the hits per box. You deliver one of those, you collect one of those of the high tiers that has a bounty code. Some of those cards can fetch quite a bit of coin on the secondary market, and also collecting that whole set, you’ll be able to get rewarded with a really nice, hard-signed autograph of one of our top prospect names of this product. So, yeah, you go to Upperdeckbounty.com. Once the product releases, it’ll give you full details on what you need to collect, and what you’d be awarded with for doing that bounty program. So, like you mentioned, yeah, it’s been very popular over the last few years, and then that’s definitely not going anywhere from the product. You’ll always see a bounty in Goodwin.
KS: That sounds really awesome. Kind of the bigger picture with this release, because I open the box, I see the cards and everything else, but I don’t necessarily understand the process of everything it took to get it from conception to my hands. How does it come together from start to finish?
TS: It’s quite an undertaking. I kind of start it out, I build the roadmap, essentially, or kind of the blueprint of what we want the product to look like from a content perspective. What inserts, what brands are we including?
And from there, it’s a team effort. It really is. From our design team, our finance team, our legal department. Photo. Again, I mentioned the coordinator group that builds the actual checklist. Talent acquisitions, that then goes out and negotiates with these individual athletes. Again, Goodwin being an unlicensed product, we don’t have the luxury of a player’s association, whereas we deal in the world of hockey where we deal with the NHLPA, and we have those groups of players available to us to use within our products. Goodwin is a little different. We go out and we get the individual deals outside of our spokespeople to create the lists and create the content. It’s a labor of love internally for our team, and it is a lot of work. Ideally it doesn’t take as long as this one did, but there were some other factors, other things going on in the world that really did delay things and slow things down.
But I think people are going to be very pleased with this once they see it next week. And yeah, I mean, kudos to the entire Upper Deck team for helping make it happen. I could go on and on with the names of everyone involved, but it’s really top to bottom, all hands on deck to get a product like Goodwin created and out to the public. It’s one of the more intensive builds. Again, from content, from contracting for figuring out who makes sense. But yeah, it’s fun and it’s enjoyable. It’s something different that we get to do, like I said, outside of the realm of a player’s association, and it’s a challenge that we enjoy. We enjoy the challenge, and we try to build a better product for you guys every year.
KS: One card set I want to touch, because you mentioned this a little bit. You get the very, we’ll say, nontraditional relic cards that have actual pieces from historical events. One card, or one set I want to ask you about is the entomology cards, and forgive me if I’m pronouncing that wrong. They have actual bugs in them, correct? Like actual bugs?
TS: Yeah. So, I’d say probably almost ten years ago or so, we did our first round of entomology cards, and they were met with a lot of positivity as one of the weird, sort of outside the box things that we’ve included. There’s a couple of bug themes this year we have a manufactured patch set that will be a variety of insects and bugs, but there will be redemption cards in hobby for oversized actual bug relics. So, we’ve got butterflies and beetles and weevils and bugs I’ve never seen or hoped to never encounter in the real world. But yeah, I had a hand in helping create and actually build those cards with a few other of the team members over here, and they’re awesome. It’s probably one of the coolest, most unique cards I’ve done. So, yeah, really excited that we’re bringing some of those back for another round this year.
KS: So where do you get the bugs from for that?
TS: Again, kudos to our coordinator team for sourcing that and finding a vendor, a merchant who has these sort of things available for sale. There is a market for it. So luckily we were able to find some really good trusted sources, some vendors that had these, and they shipped them to us very delicately. They gave us instructions on how to handle them without damaging them and again, being very careful placing them into actual trading cards. But yeah, they were fun. It was a lot of fun. Very different than anything I’ve ever been a part of with the product. I think you guys are going to love those cards when you get to see them in hand.
KS: Well, with a card like that, even though it’s a deceased animal cased in the trading card, are there any type of health or safety protocols you have to follow in order to give them to consumers?
TS: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Again, I mentioned our legal team earlier. They do a very good job of making sure that the content that we put in the product is safe for the consumer. You’ll notice with a lot of our relics in Goodwin, we do encapsulate them. We cover them with like a plastic sheet or some other sort of encapsulation. Just to kind of keep your hands off of them. Again, being very delicate or various materials, but yeah, these have all been tested. They’re safe to have in your collection, they’re safe to have on a shelf on display. I wouldn’t recommend taking them apart and eating them or anything like that. It certainly won’t kill you, but you probably wouldn’t feel too good. I would keep the cards intact and just enjoy them from that sense. Our legal team does a really good job of making sure everything we put out there is safe for the collector. So, yeah, you guys are alright.
KS: So, asking you this as a proud card father, someone who’s put this product out there, and if you can reveal this, I don’t know if this is something that hasn’t been announced in the product or not. Do you have a favorite card that is in this year’s release that you can reveal?
TS: That’s a good question. It’s hard to pick again, because so much goes into the variety of different content. I really love the playing cards this year. Last year we did a set of playing cards that featured unique animals that you could collect the whole set. We have pivoted that this year to include the athletes. I think those are going to be really fun. We’ve done those in some of our hockey brands, but to pull an ace of a Michael Jordan or King James or Tiger Woods, I think those are going to be really fun for collectors, and again, they’re going to have a very vibrant color and very unique technology feel to them. So, those should be pretty fun.
From the relic side, I really love the King Tut stuff we did this year. So 100th anniversary in 22 of when they discovered King Tut’s tomb. We sourced Egyptian sand to do some sand relics that will kind of tell the story of that excavation and discovery of King Tut’s tomb. So, I think those are probably some of the more unique relic cards, again, outside of the bugs, that are definitely up there for some of my favorites. But yeah, those are two that really come to mind, as far as something new that you guys are going to find in the product this year.
KS: That is some next level commitment to getting cards out there. All right, I’ll get you out of here on this. We’ve talked Goodwin. What else do you have coming out for Upper Deck in the near future?
TS: We’ve got a lot coming out. We’ve had a lot of launches, a lot of products that have been delayed that are finally coming out. We just got OPC Platinum out. That one released yesterday. 21-22 Platinum has a new configuration with a larger pack. I thought the cards looked really nice, the ones that I got to see, but in the coming weeks and months, you’re going to see, not only Goodwin, but you’re going to see 2022 Metal Universe Champions, which again utilizes a lot of the Goodwin checklist, but ports it over to our Skybox Metal Universe brand, you’re going to find PMG cards of the names I mentioned earlier, like the Bryce Youngs, the Scoot Henderson, some really big fun chase cards in there.
The hockey side, we’ve got a lot of stuff coming out. Again, trying to catch up. We’ve got quite a bit of things, but we’ve got Credentials, which is a brand that I think definitely will need some love. It’s going to be coming out year two technically. It’s been delayed quite a bit, but it has a dual rookie class element to it, which I think is going to be really cool. What else have we got coming out? We’ve got some really fun Marvel stuff. I’ve got to be a little more careful of what I speak to that, but I can tell you there’s some really fun Marvel on the way. We just recently released Marvel Allure, which has been met with a lot of positivity. Those cards look beautiful in hand. You’re going to see a lot of new stuff coming out in the coming months. The Metal Champs I think will be a really fun one this summer to kind of pair it with 22 Goodwin, I think collectors are going to enjoy those two sets quite a bit.
KS: That all sounds really awesome. I know I’m looking forward to Goodwin. I know you are too. Hopefully the rest of our audience is. Tony, thank you so much for joining us today.
TS: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Kelsey.
Hobby Musings: Goodwin Champions with Tony Sirianni
Kelsey’s ability to bring hobby coverage to the mainstream sports fan has been a true asset. GTS is happy to feature his thoughts on collecting in Hobby Musings. The opinions expressed are his and do not necessarily reflect those of GTS Distribution.
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