Cardboard Creations: OPC Platinum

O-Pee-Chee Platinum parallels are one of my favorite parts of player collecting. Honestly I wish there were more of them every year, kind of like how Topps does their Chrome baseball set. I checked the list for 2020 and there are almost 20 different parallels for each card. While that may sound insane to some hockey collectors, I think it would be awesome. I've seen some almost complete rainbows of cards from this set and they look amazing.

Lately Upper Deck has generally done the same set of OPC Platinum parallels such as Red Prism, Orange Checkers and Blue Cubes. While those are great on their own, the more recent additions of the Sunset and Pond Hockey parallels are even better if you ask me. 

I like those two a bit more as they crop the player from the background image making it stand out better against the custom background. Since they only have these two though, I thought it would be fun to come up with some of my own custom designs.

The first one I'm calling the Lunar version as it's got an awesome image of the moon as the background. In my custom set of parallels this would be the 1/1 version.

Obviously these customs are based on the 2019-20 O-Pee-Chee Platinum design. I got my inspiration from the new Sunset parallel so this made perfect sense as a place to start. I took a scan from one of those and went to town re-creating it to the point where swapping the backgrounds was all that I needed to do for any additional design I wanted. 

As far as the re-creation process, I used my go-to design software: Inkscape, which I've used for every one of the custom card designs I've posted on here.

One of the more subtle features of that I wanted to capture in my version is the way the player is cropped to be layered behind the bottom portion of the card and layered above the top portion. That required a little extra work in the software, but was well worth it.

Once I had the basics in place and fine tuned to they way I liked, all I had to do was come up with additional backgrounds. That was probably the hardest part for me. After thinking of the Lunar idea a few more ideas popped into my head and I just went from there. 

Here are eight more designs to round out my first entire page:

Top Row: Lunar, Dragon Scale, Nebula
Middle Row: Matrix, Forest, Lava
Bottom Row: Amethyst, Steampunk, Tie-Dye

Even though the Lunar was my original idea, I think the Dragon Scale ended up being my favorite. It just stands out more than the others. I think something like that would look amazing printed on the OPC Platinum card stock.

Beyond that I just tried to come up with a nice variety of colors and textures. The Matrix one ended up looking pretty cool. And I know Upper Deck already has the Color Wheel version, but the Tie-Dye wound up looking so good I had to include it.

I wasn't completely sure the Steampunk design idea would work, but after some searching I found this image that worked pretty well with what I was trying to do. I'm not sure if anyone's ever done a steampunk themed parallel. The closest might be Metal Universe.

I've got several more ideas in the works, so I will hopefully be able to put together a second full page at some point. I'm open to any suggestions for new designs too. I just need a high quality image to work with and the rest is pretty quick work now.

One last thought on these: I think it would be really cool if Upper Deck held some kind of contest to come up with a new parallel design/background for an upcoming version of OPC Platinum. Maybe it doesn't need to be full on fan designs, but at least opening up the background selection to fan submissions/voting would be awesome.