A Pair of Portfolio Wire Photos

It's surprising that I'm finding the time to get anything posted lately, but here it is a little after 9 and I've actually got a few minutes to myself.  I don't have much time though, so how about a quick pair of cards from the 2015-16 Upper Deck Portfolio release that have been sitting in my draft folder for months?

I have no interest in the Portfolio set proper, as seems to be the case with an increasing percentage of modern releases.  I do love a good "wire photo" card though, and there were a bunch of these included as a subset in the Portfolio release.  Well, two subsets really.  Cards 251-270 on the checklist are wire photos of current stars or retired greats, like The Great One here.  Cards 296-315 are wire photos of the hottest rookies at the time.  Not sure why they broke them into two separate groups like that.

As the caption on this one indicates, the photograph came from a game on October 9th, 1993.  Thanks to the wonder that is the internet it took me about ten seconds here to look it up and see that Wayne had himself a nice night with a pair of goals and no fewer than four assists in a 10-3 route of the Wings!  With a single click of the mouse I could even buy a ticket stub from that game on eBay for $20 if I cared to.  We're living in a world of convenience.

My lone complaint is that the backs don't always reference the specific game that the photo is from, but instead sometimes have a generic write-up from that overall time in the player's career.  How much more interesting would this card have been had Upper Deck given us a brief write-up of the game itself?  Maybe detailing the unlikely hat trick scored that night by Gretzky's teammate Dominic Lavoie, who had just five career goals (true fact!)?

The lot of these that I picked up contained 20 cards in total, exactly half of the available wire photo cards from this set.  I enjoy all of them, but the big draws for me were the Gretzky and this Connor McDavid.  McDavid was obviously the big name in the hobby at the time this set came out, and although I've already got the only card of his I'll ever want, this was another cool pseudo-rookie card for cheap coin.

The back of this one actually does reference the depicted game.  Connor potted the only two goals for the Oilers that evening, including the game winner in overtime, in what was his first appearance against the #2 overall pick from his same draft class, Jack Eichel.

I paid less than a buck per card shipped for my lot, which seems like a fair price given that the McDavid appears to go for around $7 to $10 alone.  Maybe someday I'll track down the remaining 20 wire photos from this release, the entire run would look good in a binder...