Card Spotlight: 5-28-10

1998 Topps Tek #33 Pattern 14 - Robin Ventura

Late nineties cards would have made me quit the hobby, if I wasn't already gone at that point. Someone, somewhere, must have thought that endless parallels were the way to really make money.

Topps kicked it up a notch by forgoing the usual method of just changing the color and decided to change the background pattern of each variation. In the end, this became the main collecting challenge that some people are still chasing.

It seems like a simple challenge to collect a 90 card set, until you factor in that every card has 90 different patterns to collect. Unless my math is off, that is 8,100 different cards to collect. I'm glad the White Sox only have three cards, which equates to 270 cards.

It does get better. There are also "diffractor" parallels for each pattern. So double the amount of cards for a master set to 16,200 cards! This could be a cooler precursor to the putrid "Moments & Milestones". I'm not a big fan of endless parallels, but this set was pretty cool. It boasted a see-through technology that is a big advantage over the die cut cards. Where the die cards usually get dinged up and damaged right out of the package, these cards do not have the delicate intricate structures, but still look that way.

I love the way Ventura seems to be busting out of the box into a world full of waves and confetti. It's a world I'd love to visit sometime. If only the '94 Sox team was able to finish the season, maybe this would be what the victory lap would have looked like.