Most photography for hockey cards follows a pretty simple formula: get a nice action shot with a good look at the player's face and you're set.
Sure, sometimes things can get a bit more creative: perhaps a photographer captures or to get a more casual, fun vibe, but that's about as wild as these things typically get.
But then we have the UD Portraits series from Upper Deck's 2023-24 series of hockey cards.
For some bizarre reason, the folks at Upper Deck created a series of hockey cards with the players photoshopped into portraits from the past, complete with a faux gilded frame as if the card has been mounted in a museum.
Canucks captain Quinn Hughes has one of the more bizarre cards in this series, as his card features a massive Elizabethan ruff collar around his neck, as he pens an ode in his journal with a feather quill like an ersatz William Shakespeare.
Hughes better be careful: he's in danger of getting a two-minute minor for ruffing.
Is there any logic to this depiction of Hughes? Who knows? But the rest of the UD Portraits series is equally bizarre.
For example, Sidney Crosby is the very model of a modern Major-General...
...Jake Oettinger is a fourth Musketeer...
...Mitch Marner is an unabashed fop...
…and Connor McDavid is the king, not to be confused with Elvis.
At least the Senators' Josh Norris makes some sense as a Roman centurion, an image the Senators have used as their logo since their inception.
To be honest, this barely scratches the surface of how weird these cards get. There's no denying one thing, at least: no one has a bigger ruff than Quinn Hughes.
This is not the way I anticipated airbrushing returning to hockey cards.
