This blog has really opened my eyes to how weird the 90s was as a decade. Baseball cards started out as cheap things on brown cardboard that came with gum and by the end of the decade some of them were CD-Roms. We talk about the pace of change now, but the 90s was the decade when the pace accelerated. In a way, change itself changed.
Looking back on the mid-90s now puts me in the curious position of knowing I lived through it but also feeling like it's an utterly alien decade. It doesn't help when trying to track down a baseball card that becomes symbolic of how complicated things got in the 90s.
Card Number 608: Topps Mystery Finest, 1998; #M9
"Topps Finest, you say. Why, that should be cinch to find on Trading Card Database."
Narrator: It was not easy to find on Trading Card Database.
The Mystery Finest cards were inserts in the Topps flagship set. There were a few different types. This is from the 20-card set labelled 'Borderless' on TCDb.
It's a very foiley card and it doesn't scan very well on the flatbed.
The overhead scan was much brighter. The baseball in the background was a recurring motif on Finest cards in the 90s.
Oh, on the back there's a clue to the card's set, as it says 'Mystery Finest'. Of course, that only helps if you know that Mystery Finest was different to regular Finest, which I didn't.
Total: 608 cards
I think it's so cool how polarizing the 90's were for card collectors. Some collectors love it for ingenuity inspired by card companies competing with each other... pushing each other to new limits. While others remember the tail-end of the Junk Wax Era... which left a bad taste in the mouths of some collectors. For some it was the beginning of their collecting years... while it marked the end for others. Then again... I guess this could apply to just about any decade. As for me... sure there are some sets that I think are boring... but overall... the 90's really shaped me as a collector. To this day I enjoy shiny parallels and collecting on-card autographs and game-used memorabilia cards... and the credit all goes to the 90's.
ReplyDeleteI would like a detailed year on year guide to all the card sets and so on that offered a view across the entire industry. At the moment of have to piece together info from a number of sources.
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