The Mystery Of Finest....Is it Galarraga? Johnson? Griffey Jr? Walker?

Take a look at this newest pickup off from eBay...

At first you are thinking...did he forget to post a pic? I can immediately tell you no I didn't. That is what the front of the card looks like. Here is the back....

If you still don't know what this card is, I am going to tell you. It's a 1998 Topps Mystery Finest Card. The mystery of course being which player is on the front of the card. The sleek black peel on the top of the card made you ask yourself, should I or shouldn't I? Who is under there? Maybe I should just take a peek..(of course if you even lifted the black up you might as well peel it all off). It was extremely hard not to want to unpeel it and I never found one time where I didn't, of course I only pulled maybe two in my lifetime. That's the reason why I did a search for an unpeeled one as I wanted to add it to my 90's PC. I think it's a cool piece and I was pretty impressed to had found one unpeeled, and no, I don't plan on unpeeling it.

I believe that Mystery Finest was one of the cooler inserts in the 1990's and something I wished Topps would bring back. I think the concept would work great and make their inserts interesting once again. At the time, these fell 1:36 packs which I think would work now too helping make the card more valuable. These also had refractor parallels that fell at a much harder rate of 1:144. Imagine the refractor parallels Topps could make with these if they brought them back. However, I think if these were ever brought back especially with parallels, they shouldn't put the word refractor on the back of the card letting you know what's on the other side. I don't want to know without peeling it. That would add many fun collecting possibilities and a new fun way to collect.

Will Topps ever make a move like this? Probably not. If they did, it may help drive my interest back to collecting baseball cards more especially their flagship product that seems to have taken a dive over the last few years. Hopefully Topps will read this.