One thing I like to collect is relic cards containing something outside of the swatch of jersey or pants that usually come embedded in cards. NASCAR cards have been a nice source of unique relics, Panini's various holiday-themed sets often have interesting things like Santa hats, towels, and bits of NFL goal line pylons, and other sets occasionally include things like bits of shoe, hockey stick parts, laces, and catcher's masks.
When it comes to the UFC, the most common relics come from clothing and the fighting surface. I haven't seen much in the way of glove or tape relics, but there has been at least one set that had redemptions for fighter mouthguards. A guy I buy a lot of my UFC cards from listed that Ricardo Almeida cage relic for sale, and I made sure to get it for my unique relics collection. It is pretty much as advertised, a rubber-coated bit of wire clipped from a fight cage fence panel.
The rest of the cards in these scans are some of the parallels I picked up from the same group of auctions. This particular seller usually sets up auctions to end on the night of an event, with listings featuring the fighters from that card. It looks like these came from UFC 203, where Stipe Miocic retained his title with a win over Alistair Overeem. Urijah Faber looked about like he's at the end of his career, and Jessica Eye lost her 4th in a row. Supposedly the UFC gave her one more fight to get a win, or she will lose her contract. I think Urijah Faber's last fight is probably coming up on his last fight in December, and he has said as much. The other big thing at UFC 203 was CM Punk's debut, where he lost convincingly to Mickey Gall. I am pretty sure I pulled a CM Punk UFC autograph in a group break at one point, but I can't find a post about that. I must have sold it before I made up a post on it.
The 2012 Finest Grill Guards are easily the rarest UFC hits that I know of and I have only seen two for auction since their release. There have been a couple of redemptions for fight-used gloves and the fight-tape cards are kind of rare too. The sponsor autographs and fist-o-graph autographs are pretty rare autograph cards.
ReplyDeleteThey do seem to be pretty rare, as most of the web traffic on them seems to be about Topps' failure to fulfill the redemptions. I actually got an expired fight glove redemption in a break a few months ago. It would have been cool to receive the glove anyway, but Topps wasn't having any of it.
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