Its been a while since I did a Set of the Day and I’ve been wanting to talk about card sets beyond Star Wars recently so it is a perfect time to talk about my latest acquisition! I have long collected costume/memorabilia cards for Marvel movies and that’s basically it. While I enjoy the collection I have built up, I’ve always wanted to get more from my favorite Marvel movies than that and lately, I saw that Upper Deck is making more interesting insert cards over the last 3-4 years than in the past so I thought I’d give one a try.
The insert set that makes the most sense to me to collect is the Behind The Lens set. I love to see the art of movie making because it seems like such a fun job and the things movies can pull off is obviously really impressive. So a behind the scenes style set for Marvel movies is a great idea. Ant-Man has some nice visual effects in it and is an all-around fun movie so I thought it would be a good set to start with, especially since Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the other early sets to get the Behind The Lens treatment and everything in those movies is done in front of green screens which doesn’t make for very interesting images. The Behind The Lens set for Ant-Man is 16 cards and it has a mix of images from the set of Ant-Man and some behind the scenes images like the one above. It is cool to see the behind the scenes images because you have a window into how many props are made by the wardrobe department for a big budget movie. The people who work behind the scenes certainly deserve some recognition as well!
Another image I enjoyed was the one of Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly looking tired between shots. Acting is a glamorous job but it is surely also demanding and seeing a candid image like this shows how much effort the actors put in to a movie. Images like this are definitely the draw of this set as I feel like the card design by Upper Deck is a bit plain. The camera along the top and the Ant-Man mask is fine. It doesn’t look great but it doesn’t look bad. The Ant-Man logo is actually maybe a bit too big in the bottom-right corner but again, not something to complain about.
My favorite image was of the cast altogether. While this is a normal sight on a movie set, it is cool to see everybody working together to make the movie and seeing celebrities at work. This brings me to the greatest weakness of the cards, the back. The design fits the theme of the card but it isn’t particularly impressive or noteworthy but the text is disappointing. It is a really basic description of what you see on the front which is generally pretty obvious on these cards. An interesting fact would have made this much nicer set and made it worth looking at both sides of the card. As it is, I will probably just appreciate the images on the front and be done.
There are some nice images in the sixteen card set and I only showed you a few to make it worth your while to buy these. Some of the cards I left out are not as interesting as what you see here and I think this could have easily been a nine card set and be just as good. With that said, I’d say this is a good insert card set and I’m glad it is in my collection. It wasn’t quite as exciting as I hoped but hopefully Upper Deck will create even better Behind The Lens sets for future in newer Marvel movies. Expect more Marvel cards coming in the future as I plan on expanding my collection quite a bit in the near future!
Daily Trading Cards 