Random Card Of The Day:1995 Stadium Club John Elway

Random Cardboard Of The Day: 1995 Stadium Club John Elway

Christmas Card 20

Dream Team

1995-1999 put out some of the greatest looking cards ever in the history of the hobby. Take me back to when the cards were amazing.

No, these cards aren't flipper material, nor do they hold a lot of money value, but they do hold a lot of memory value and that is where the big money is at for me.

Out of all of the 1996 Score packs I ripped; I was never ever fortunate enough to land a Dream Team insert. They were not easy to find at 1:72 packs making it one in every two or three boxes.

The 10-card set had fallen out of my memory until I was looking up random card sets on Burbank Sportcards where I spotted some of these. And not only did I spot some of them, I grabbed some.

 

If you look closely behind all of the shine, I try not to look too far behind it, you will see a team/city tie in behind each player. 

I have a Barry Sanders on the way which will put me roughly halfway through the set, so maybe this one won't be too hard to accomplish.

Thoughts on the players or the set welcomed in comments!

Please remember, at Burbank Sportcards Beckett Marketplace , you can save 10% by using code 15Burbank at checkout. Shipping is also free on orders of $50 or more. The more you buy, the more you save and the more you won't have to pay shipping on.

Let's Talk About Sets Volume 54:Being Grounded

It's been two years since I decided to fully chase the 1995 Summit Ground Zero set but overall it's a set I have been chasing for many years.

I pulled my first Ground Zeros back in 1995. Probably about five total out of packs. Since then I have accumulated about half of the 200 card set with my biggest needs coming today.

The set needs I have added so far are mainly the lower end players, today I tackled a few bigger names.

John Elway

Steve Young

 

Brett Favre

This is a huge sigh of relief to knock these guys down. Maybe now this once "dream set" can start to become more of a reality.

Thanks to Burbank Sportscards Beckett Marketplace  I saved 10% by using code 15Burbank at checkout and was finally able to add these key pieces. Now to search on there again for more.

Let's Talk About Sets Volume 51:1997 Pinnacle Inscriptions

With only 50 cards in the base set, this one shouldn't be too hard to chase. What I enjoy most about this base set is all of the dufex technology.

 

This set would bring back a lot of memories to complete.

I remember the gas station owner I used to buy cards from, was my hobby shop, set aside an entire box of the product for me to grab a pack or two at a time when I could afford to. On top of that, he also gave 10% off the entire box.

With these 12 adds from Burbank Sportscards Beckett Marketplace (also saved 10% by using code 15Burbank which I suggest you try as well), I am creeping towards the set.

MMMB:Mail Day's Galore To Kick Off The New Year!

 

2020 has officially ended, what does that mean for this blog, some changes.

As you have already seen, I changed the face of this blog, name, added some new segments and updated a Top 15 Want List on the left side. I feel this is the best this blog has looked in years and plan to keep it this way. I do hope that you all like it as much as I do.

Today's post is a new segment that I am using to recap all of my mail days instead of doing a few cards at a time per day. It's called Monday Morning Mail Bag or in short, MMMB.

First up, my winnings from The View From The Third Floor who held some Halloween giveaways and I have been slacking in posting of my wonderful prize winning.

My PWE was loaded full of big names of the NFL, most of which I use in my by-player boxes I sort out.

These cards will pad those collections nicely. And no, these aren't the real cards, they are reprints but great looking reprints.

Thanks goes out to The View From The Third Floor for the giveaway and great mail day!

Up next, I have been doing so many PWE trades that I ate through a book+ of stamps for on Twitter.

This trade mail day was from Matt's Cards on Twitter. Great guy and easy to trade with. My favorite card was this Harry Carson from this trade. Cool design and relic.  I didn't have memorabilia card of him before so this is all new to me!

Thanks for the trade Matt's Cards!

My next trade had a bonus surprise card in it.

 

First up a Danny Dimes rookie year card I didn't have along with a Ximines rookie and Nate Solder Xtra points parallel.

Followed by an Aaron Judge parallel from Stadium Club

Miguel Andujar who I wished had more opportunities with the Yanks.

And Garrett Cooper. Not a name I am familiar with, but I also don't watch baseball as much as I used to either.

The surprise of the package was this Ozzie Newsome relic that will tie in really well with the autograph of him I landed in a Mega Box of Prestige I opened. I have been trying to tie together a relic and autograph of each Hall Of Famer autograph I have. It's a fun challenge. Some I only have the relic for so far such as Tom Brady who may be the most elusive autograph I need and most likely will never land.

 

Big thanks for the surprise @33CardShop and hope we can trade again!

The final card, an Evan Engram rookie auto "patch" I landed from @anthonyscards

I really like the look of these, well other than the small patch circle. I think a square would have looked better. But overall, solid design and I made sure not to drop it. Sorry, Evan that was a low blow for a Pro Bowl player. (once again I will never get how he made it)

Thanks goes out to @anthonyscards for the trade.

Hope everyone enjoyed this weeks mail day recap, more to come next Monday!

Breakin' Wax:1995 Skybox Impact Football

My final box break thanks to Shane over at Project Pedro Blog, comes the action packed Skybox Impact!

I remember going to Ames once a week and finding some packs of this to open in the car. I also found some at the local pharmacy as well.

It's a product I have come to try and build a master set of. As anyone who knows how hard it is to build a master set, building one from the 90's is even more challenging.

But, I will get there.

Let's see how my final box went from Shane.

 

In this box of 1995 Skybox Impact, I got to open 36 packs of 12 cards. There are inserts aplenty in the product!

I should note before going on, this wasn't a very fun box to open only because the cards were bricks sadly. But, I did manage through and not too many cards were damaged.

The base card set features decent photography and a touch of foil on the players first name. There are 200 cards to collect in the base set including veterans

Rookies

Super Bowl subset

Jags and Panthers innagural season subset

Super Sophs subset

And The Specialists subset.

The inserts was where it was at for me. I still have mine from 1995 and have been adding to it ever since.

Impact Power inserts fell 1:3 packs. These were all dupes here

And these were new to my set chase. There are 30 to chase in all.

My favorite insert was this Countdown to Impact cards that fell 1:20 packs. I beat the odds here with those. There are 10 of these to collect and i like the fact the numbers on the card are embossed. I am slowly creeping towards the set. The Deion I had, but Barry I needed.

 

And finally, Fox Same Game, More Attitude cards fell 1:9 packs and have 15 cards to collect. This is another one I am creeping towards. A couple of these were set dupes.

Well, that does it for the box breaks from Shane. Thanks goes out to Shane for the trade and hopefully we can keep our tradition alive again this year and do it again.

Breakin' Wax:1995 Pinnacle Zenith Football

1996 Zenith along Ex and the Spx's of the 90's were king to me. Nothing topped those. I know I mention often how much I love this set or that set, but deep down, those three can't be touched.

One product in the 90's I never got to open for football was 1995 Zenith. I opened TONS AND TONS of 1996, but never once laid sight on 1995.

In my latest box break from Shane over at Project Pedro Blog, I finally got the opportunity to open some even in box form for the first time.

In every box of 1995 Zenith football, there were 24 packs of 6 cards. There was a shot at three different inserts in every box, most notably, Z-Team.

There are 150 base cards in the base set, designed like the yellow brick road I would say, including veterans and

"rookies". For some reason or another, Zenith didn't do real rookies. They made it like baseball and called rookies, "rookies" from the year before like this Willie. In the three year run of the 90's, it never once put a true rookie card in it's product.

Like I said earlier, there are three chase inserts in the product.

Second Season which I didn't recognize at first. I assumed it was apart of the base set until I saw the numbers on the back. These fall 1:6 packs.

 

Give me some dufex baby! These Rookie Roll Call fell 1:72 packs and are beautiful both front

 

and back. I am chasing this set as well and you can also see that not more than 1200 sets were produced.

And finally the moment you have been waiting for....Z Team John Elway. Wowza!! These fall 1:24 packs or one per box. Much different than the 1:3 boxes the 1996 ones fall.

Just like with the 1996 version, I plan on chasing down the 1995 one as well. Cards look amazing.

How does this one live up to 1996? Well, it falls flat with the one insert and the base cards. 1996 base cards put these ones to shame. The Z-Teams look better in 1996 as well, but love me some dufex so this one is solid. Hard to beat a perfected product like the 1996 version.

I am working on so much from the Zenith 1996 product still and this one as well including the dufex inserts, Z-Teams, and base ones.

What are your guys thoughts on Zenith? Have a favorite year of it?

Outbreak

The definition of Outbreak is "the sudden or violent start of something unwelcome, such as war, disease, etc."

It's something that is going on now and something that happened in the 1995 hit movie, Outbreak. In that movie, a dangerous airborne virus threatens civilization-hmm think on that-and it spreads through a small Californian town and not the world like we are experiencing today.  The movie stars Dustin Hoffman, whatever happened to him by the way, who is a contagious disease expert along with his ex-wife (Rene Russo) that the town brings in to help stop the spread of the disease. The movie also has Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey and Donald Sutherland.

To me, not all outbreaks can be taken negatively as you can turn the word into something positive with the right wording. Between 1996-1999, the hobby experienced an outbreak of creativity like no other. We had acetate autographs, cards that made players move for seconds of time, cards in cans, cards in tins, one card high end packs and coins and cards together as one hobby just to name some.

It was a great time to be alive as a card collector watching the hobby boom.

One of my outbreaks at the time was an addiction to cards and coins. They weren't worth much then and really aren't now, but I just loved it. I wasn't even a coin collector but occasionally you could see me adding a wheat penny here and there when I found one.

I actually even spent the time to put the coins in the card slots if I had the right player and coin that matched up. A lot of the time that wasn't the case as there was two cards per pack, one with a slot and one not and one coin for retail which is what I bought. Hobby had two coins and three cards per pack so your odds was better that way.

With all of my recently found extra time, I have been scouring eBay for some packs in the last few months when a bumped into a listing of a completed 1996 30 bronze football coin set in a special Pinnacle Coin binder. The set was listed for $3.99 starting bid and $6.99 shipping. It also had a make offer option which I always take the option on. So I offered the starting bid and the seller immediately accepted. One would guess that they either needed money or wanted to make sure this was gone.

You know, I buy junk.

Here is the front of the binder and the backside of the first half of coins.

Open it up and you find an outbreak of the 30 coin set that spreads across two pages

Some pretty big names mixed in including Troy Aikman, Jim Kelly, John Elway, Brett Favre (and for me Kerry Collins and Mark Brunell)

And Emmitt Smith, Steve Young and Jerry Rice just to name a few. The names alone made the purchase worthwhile to me.

Here is the final side.

I think this is a pretty unique item for my 90's PC and not something I ever see pop up. And really I haven't ever seen this item. It may not be packs to open to take me down memory lane like I had hoped, but I was still very happy with my purchase.

Outbreak was a great movie for it's time and may have to give it another watch since it has been awhile and I don't fully remember it that well. I know the timing of that isn't great with everything going on, but I just gotta remember the good guys win in the end. I foresee that at some point for us as well.

Before I close, I must point out there really hasn't ever been a creative outbreak in the hobby like that since 1999, but there has been a outbreak of positivity in the hobby as of recent. Whether its on Twitter with all of the giveaways, pay it forwards or Panini simply giving away boxes and packs or it's also bloggers helping each other out and doing free card threads almost every day for some. As the saying goes, we are all in this together and it's great to see in this hobby community that we all have each others backs when we are down.

Breakin' Wax:1998 UD3 Football Pack

Nothing is better than breaking some memories.

On one of my $25 A Week challenges, I told you about a couple of packs of 1998 UD3 football I got for cheap that I would be breaking a pack of later on, well, it's time to break it open. Remember, I am only opening one of these packs, not both. I plan on keeping the other sealed for fun.

UD3 returns for it's second season after a successful 1997 in which I bought a ton of. I don't remember how much 1998 I was able to find but I did break some.

A look at the overall base set is pretty deep. The 270 card base set is broken down into so many subsets,
Future Shock-Embossed (1-30), Next Wave-Embossed (31-60), Upper Realm-Embossed (61-90), Future Shock-Light F/X (91-120), Next Wave-Light F/X (121-150), Upper Realm-Light F/X (151-180), Future Shock-Rainbow (181-210), Next Wave-Rainbow (211-240), and Upper Realm-Rainbow (241-270)

Obviously being 1998, my hope was to land Randy Moss or Peyton Manning. I knew my odds were against me, but you never know.

The seller actually even tossed in one of the base cards which is actually the toughest pull at 1:125 odds. This is an Upper Realm embossed.

Now time to bust the pack.

Inside this is what you find. Cards are protected by two pieces of cardboard.

John Elway Upper Realm Light FX 1:6 packs.

Future Shock rainbow, great looking card up close, only falls 1:1.3 packs. Too bad it wasn't the rookies I had hoped for but solid card to have regardless just because of design.

Next Wave embossed falls 1:4 packs.

Keep in mind, these are just base cards at different levels of severity. I think it's a fun concept and makes it challenging to build a base set which is what a set collector like myself enjoys. Also helps give it added value so you want to chase it.

There are also multiple levels of die cut parallels and since I didn't pull any, I am not even going to touch that project.

Let's see how long I can hold onto the second pack without opening it. Because who knows what treasure could be hiding in there....