Back to the great cards I found for 25 cents at the Tristar Collectors Show in Houston on June 1. I've got at least three more posts to go to cover the 60 cards I bought. I'll interweave them with my Summer Clearance trade posts.
1995 UC3 Clear Shots #10 Alex Gonzalez
UC3 was produced by Pinnacle in 1995 and featured cards with a plastic coating which made the image on the card move. Clear Shots was a 12-card insert found in 1:24 packs. When you move this card from side to side the image switches between a head shot and an action shot. The back of this card is blank. The back had, for some reason, a protective film which left a residue on the card when I tried to remove it.
1995 UC3 Cyclone Squad #18 Tim Salmon
Another insert in 1995 UC3. This was a 20-card set inserted 1:4 packs. When you move the card, the wheels behind the player appear to spin like the spokes of a bicycle.
1996 Collector's Choice Crash The Game #10 Frank Thomas
I'd gotten tired of Collector's Choice by 1996 and didn't buy much of it, so I never saw one of these. They'd been running this sort of contest for a couple of years but this is the fanciest design for what is essentially a throw-away card. The holographic foil printing on the front is quite stunning. I guess I'd like to see the "Super Premium" version of this card. Frank hit his 22nd home run of the year on June 29th so I could have been a winner.
1996 SP Special FX #19 Fred McGriff
This was a 48-card insert in 1996 SP. It was probably not to hard to get one of these as they were inserted 1:5 packs. I usually didn't buy many packs of such high end sets. I actually had the Chipper Jones card from this set which I bought on eBay a few years ago. What do you think of these holograms? Personally I always thought these ones featuring a head shot of the player to be kind of creepy. As you move the card back and forth, the head seems to turn to keep facing you with cold dead eyes.
1996 Topps Laser Bright Spots #6 Jason Schmidt
Laser-cut, rather than die-cut cards, were popular for about 20 minutes in the mid-1990s. Topps had a whole set. I liked them but they were pricey. At $5 for a pack of 4 cards, I only bought one pack. This is the first insert from the set I've seen. Not only does this card feature the entire top section of the card laser cut, all of that part is covered in heavy silver foil.
1996 Zenith #137 Chipper Jones
The only cards from this set I owned were 3 Phillies cards I bought on eBay in 2009. I don't believe I ever saw packs of this for sale anywhere. This Chipper card is part of the base set, the "Honor Roll" subset. These were high gloss, heavy card stock cards with lots of gold foil on the front.
1997 Collector's Choice #330 Mark McGwire
I bought even less 1997 Collector's Choice than I did 1996 so I'm not too familiar with the set. This was a subset called "Griffey Hot List". That's what the red foil in the upper left corner says. That and the dufex printing set the front apart from the regular base set cards. The back looks like a regular card, complete with another appearance of Collector's Choice's mascot, Stumpy.
1997 Donruss Diamond Kings #4 Chuck Knoblauch
In 1997, Diamond Kings was still just a numbered insert set.
1997 Donruss Preferred Silver #191 Gary Sheffield
1997 Donruss Preferred was an early attempt by Donruss to make it difficult for collectors, be they set collectors, team collectors, or player collectors, to meet their collecting goals. First the cards were expensive, $5 for a 5-card packs. The packs were actually little tin boxes which themselves were collectable. The base set came in three flavors, bronze, silver and gold. There weren't parallel cards, but each card was either bronze, silver or gold with the bronze being more numerous and available and the gold being harder to find. Then there were various die-cut parallels. I bought a couple of tins and left it go at that.
1997 Flair Showcase Wave of the Future #8 Richie Sexson
1997 Flair was Fleer's attempt to frustrate collectors with multiple parallel levels but this was just an insert to the set.
1997 Score Stellar Season #17 Gary Sheffield
This 18-card insert set was available in 1:35 packs of 1997 Score. It featured holographic foil printing that looks better in person then in this scan. 1997 Score was another difficult set with 6 different parallel cards.
Since my, admittedly impossible, collecting goal is to collect at least one kind of card from each set I actually know something about this. In 1996, there were approximately 25,000 different kinds of cards available (counting base sets, parallels and inserts). In 1997 there were over 35,000, and the numbers just went up from there.
