Super shiny slippy centering

A packet of insert cards has arrived courtesy of eBay and I will be blogging them over the next couple of weeks. I'm going to start with the shiniest card in the packet.

Card Number 649: Topps Sweet Strokes, 1997; #SS7

Soooooo shiny....

This insert card scanned surprisingly well. I'm not sure what the shininess is because unlike the chromatised cards or the foil board cards this is how it came off the scanner. 

The back is psychedelic. The write up is about Tony's 1996 season and his batting ability is compared to the precision of "a pool shooter". Meanwhile strike-outs are "sporadic accidents".

I noticed the front of this card felt a bit misaligned. It was made more  obvious by this being one of three copies of this Sweet Strikes card in the joblot I bought. Here they are together, and you can see the variation in print accuracy.

On some there is barely a border on the top, while the design has shifted right on a couple of them as well. 

There's variation in the placement on the backs as well.

I don't normally store duplicates in my binders, but these are so pretty and shiny, and fun to compare in terms of alignment, that I have them in a row in my Topps binder. 

Total: 649 cards

It's even more Tradition!

And a treat today, as Fleer inadvertently revive a great tradition of baseball card production.

Card Number 418: Fleer Tradition, 2000; #346

Fleer ditched the base set that looked like every other card set and instead rendered all 450 cards in a retro look that wasn't based on a Fleer set, as much as the Topps set from 1954 (judge for yourself)

One thing I really like about the back is that the watermark logo looks like a proper gum stain!

But the "gum stain" isn't the great tradition of card production from back in the day that I was referring to. (Although, as an aside, it surely won't be long before Topps start adding faux gum stains or tobacco stains to their retro products!)

Card Number 419: Fleer Tradition, 2001; #141

No, the tradition I was talking about was the good old miscut card! I bought these at the same time, just because! I've also scanned them together.

You can see how on the bottom one the ribbon is much closer to the bottom of the card. The dark line on the top edge is actually part of the image from the next card on the printing plate.

The misalignment is also noticeable on the cardbacks.

It's not obvious which set this is meant to be, so I think it's an attempt at a totally new retro-looking set. It also earns itself bonus points for having a cartoon on the back.

Little things like miscut cards amuse me. In one sense this kind of mistake helped Fleer succeed in making a genuinely retro product.

Total: 419 cards.