AMERICA

FUCK YEAH

On-card autos vs. Sticker autos

I will sum up my feelings on this issue with a couple pictures and some more words.


Here's a 2005 Topps Marquise Hill autograph. And I hate to use the card of the dead guy as an example here, but it was the best one to use for aesthetic purposes, so what can you do. But just look at this thing. The sticker is all crooked, it doesn't really fit the design of the card, and the ink itself is all screwed up, with the autograph getting cut off by the restricting border of the sticker itself. And look at that autograph. I tried to find something that looked like a letter in there, but none could be found. But let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt here. Here's another copy of this card I found on Ebay:


And another, that also showcases the most spectacular Ebay salesmanship photography ever:


These cards, to me, illustrate two things: The guy clearly started out signing the stickers with a fully-formed "MH" signature, and while that is sort of lazy, it's at least something identifiable. What happened here in all likelihood is that someone threw a big ass sheet of stickers in front of the guy, and the guy started going to town on them. And did you ever misbehave in school badly enough to to get a "here, copy this a billion times" punishment? And how did that work out? The first few looked perfect, but as boredom, frustration, the urge to hurry, and physical soreness set in, the copies toward the end got sloppy. And that same process led to the vague scribble on the sticker of the card I pulled. Second, take a look at that sticker on the second card, coming from the same year's Topps Total set. It's the exact same sticker. (and the exact same photo, too, which is a whole different kind of card company laziness) Probably from the same sticker sheet that the regular Topps version came from, too. And that shows just how impersonal and meaningless a sticker auto can be. The player has no idea what kind of card this is going on, where it's going on the card, what it looks like, how expensive a product it's going into, nothing. Why should a guy take extra care to have a nice looking autograph when writing his name a hundred times on a shiny silver sheet? What's that, you say? Maybe Marquise Hill just had a lazy autograph? Well, take a look at this other Ebay find, toward the right side of the helmet:

Why look, it's an actual signature where he actually wrote his name, lined up just right to look nice on somebody's helmet. Hell, he even added the extra touch of class that "Geaux Tigers!" adds. See, that's what happens when a guy knows what he's signing.
Now, take a look at this beauty:

Now, that's a much nicer-looking autographed card. Not the neatest handwriting, but hey, all his autographs look like that, so it probably wasn't the result of a guy's hand turning into a twisted claw from signing a thousand stickers in ten minutes. He signed his whole name, added the jersey number inscription, and lined it up real nice on the card, seemingly even working it around the Topps Pristine logo on the bottom. Because, you see, he knew what he was signing. I mean, which would you take more pride in? The signing of a sticker or the signing of a chromed-up card with a Pro Bowl jersey swatch glued to it that even someone who knew nothing about cards would automatically know was something special? And with the sticker autos, the player himself never actually touched the card. He just wrote his name a bunch of times, followed by some intern slapping them on a huge stack of cards, possibly while cursing God in the process. But with this one, man, he actually held that card in his hand and looked at it with his own two eyes. Do you understand what I am saying here? Olin Kreutz actually picked this card up before.

The hand that broke Fred Miller's jaw actually held this card.

And that sort of amazing awesomeness simply cannot be had with a sticker auto.

Armageddon is Nigh.

Upper Deck trying to buy Topps
Man, this would not be good at all. Even if Press Pass, SAGE, and Donruss/Playoff all merged, Upper Deck would still end up with basically a monopoly, and they'd end up forcing the other guys out sooner or later. So if this happens, get ready for more and more sets with packs that have a triple-digit suggested retail price, where the best stuff is all redemption cards that take three years for the company to respond to, often with, "sorry, we never actually made the Reggie Bush card you were supposed to get, so here's this Broderick Bunkley as a replacement."

Crazy to think that there was a time when there were about twenty companies making cards, and soon, we could be down to four, with only two real major companies. Seriously, this could be the beginning of the end.

One of the Smartest Ideas in Football Trading Card History

Wild Card "Wild Stripes"



In addition to being one of the smartest ideas anyone ever had in trading cards, these were also probably the most underrated. By itself, the idea seems almost stupid, honestly. Get a card that looks like the guy's normal card, but it has a stripe with a number on it, in values of 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, or 1,000. And if you wish, you can mail that card in, and recieve however many of that card is represented by the number on the stripe. So if you got a Joe Montana with a 1,000 stripe, you could mail it in and get 1,000 of the regular version of that card. Okay, that is kind of dumb, because who would want a thousand copies of one card? Ah, but you're missing the big picture here. Although their values decreased by the time Wild Card declared bankruptcy and cards could no longer be redeemed, that one Montana 1,000 was worth - in one card - as much a 1,000 of the normal version, and even today that Montana is still worth about about $200, which is amazing, considering that this was in an era where a card worth $2.50 was still something to get excited about. A card made greatly more valuable by a simple design change to the base card... Why, that sounds an awful lot like something done in -



EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TRADING CARD BRAND BEING PRODUCED TODAY.
Yup, Wild Stripe were the first ever parallel set of inserts ever made. (Overall, parallel sets could go back to some of those, "oops, we ran out of red ink, let's use blue" sets from the 20s or whatever, and Topps Tiffany was around in the 80s, but the old stuff was more of an error, and Tiffany was more of a separate set kind of deal, like Topps Chrome or Score Select now) Within just a couple years, parallels would be a standard thing (Topps Gold, Skybox Impact Colors, Upper Deck Electric, Topps Finest Refractors, Stadium Club First Day of Production, Score Artist's Proofs, Wild Card Superchrome, Pro Set Power Gold, etc.) and today, there seems to be at least six million different parallels in every set, ranging from a different color border to cards with jersey swatches and autographed cards made from the actual printing plates. Parallels are a total hobby juggernaut now, and it's all thanks to Wild Card.

I'll do more of these eventually, too, but as you can see, they're not as fun or as easy to do as the Stupid Idea ones, so they won't be as big.

Some of the Stupidest Ideas in Football Trading Card History

1993 Wild Card Regional Inserts

Hey, did you live in South Bend, Indiana, where Jerome Bettis's alma mater, Notre Dame, is located? Or did you live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he'd have the finest moments of his career?



Well, then you couldn't get this card.
During their short existence, Wild Card lived up to their name, coming up with all sorts of crazy-ass ideas. Sometimes, they had good ones, like their trademark Wild Stripes, which not only meant that you could conceivably find a card worth over $100 in any pack of any product they made, but was also the first ever parallel insert, which is something included in basically every card set made today. But then, they also had bad ideas, and this one in 1993 was one of their worst. One of the things Wild Card was known for was to have a ton of inserts, which was another part of what made them so cool, after the stripes and other redemption cards. But in 1993, they decided to up the number from a ton to a metric fuck-ton. Okay, that's not so bad. But they also decided to split them up by region. As in states in the western U.S. only got packs that contained inserts from western division teams, central states only got central division inserts, etc. This was already a stupid-assed idea in that it cut two-thirds of the country out of certain cards. For example, if you lived in California, you had no hope of getting a special insert of players like Barry Sanders, Emmit Smith, or big time rookies like Drew Bledsoe. Add the complication of the retarded way the NFL split up the divisions at the time, and it got worse. Like if you were crazy and/or stupid enough to be a Phoenix (that's what they were called still) Cardinals fan, those cards were only way the hell over on the East Coast. One possible motivation for this was the idea that hardcore collectors and dealers would spend three times as much money, taking the mail order route to bring in boxes from other regions. But seriously, who would be that stupid?



Oh yeah, me. But fuck you guys, I got special cards of Jerome Bettis AND Drew Bledsoe.

Topps Finest Protectors:



Well, on one hand, chrome cards are prone to getting scuffed up, so it is a good idea to stick an extra layer of plastic over the fronts to keep that from happening. But... Um... Hey Topps? You know, Score did the same thing with the Select Certified set one year, but here's the thing: That extra plastic stuff that's all static-clinged to the front? Theirs didn't have writing on it. You know, you guys could have just left a note on the outside of the pack or something to tell us about the glory of the Finest Protector, instead of making the cards look like shit. What we're left with is this eyesore, and we can't peel the thing off, because then, the card won't be worth anything anymore. Good job, guys.

Pacific Card Supials:

Hey look, I got a special insert card of Michael Westbrook!



Ah, but I didn't get the entire card, you see.



See, this card is an idea Pacific first got somewhere in the late 1990s called a (get ready for this) "Card Supial." You know, like "marsupial," like a kangaroo, with a pocket and all. Real clever. So you'd get a card that would be relatively hard to find, but to get the full effect, you'd have to get another card, which would also be hard to find, and slide it into that little slit cut in the back. So if you only found the little one, you'd have this tiny card that would be easy to lose, and once you found two of them, you risked damage to both cards by squeezing it in that pocket, which left little room on either side. But it's not just the stupidity of this idea that gets me; it's the sheer randomness of it all. What could possibly lead to an idea like the Card Supial? Well, after much deliberation, I have found the answer:


WEED.
Lots and lots of weed. Think about it. Imagine this statement in your head, which is where stuff tends to be imagined: "Okay, here's an idea. We're gonna make these cards, right? Except they'll be like TWO cards. And one is all tiny and goes INSIDE the other card!" Any sane person would have then imagined this statement being immediately followed by a "pppffffttttt" sound and a dude trying desperately not bust out laughing, while going "riiiight on, duuuuuuuude," which would then be followed by everyone in the room laughing for like three minutes, which would then be followed by one of them pointing to the first guy and going "you are so HIGH, dude," and more group laughter. This is the secret of the Pacific Trading Card Company.

Early Collector's Edge Serial Numbers



When Collector's Edge first burst onto the scene in 1992, they were a company with big ideas. First of all, they had one of the best ideas ever in that instead of paper, they would make the cards out of plastic, ensuring that rounded off corners would be a thing of the past. (Unfortunately, this idea didn't catch on, and even Edge themselves eventually quit using plastic card stock around '97 or so) Second of all, in the wake of perceived high print runs sucking any value out of brands like Pacific and Pro Set, they were hell-bent on keeping the print runs low, including ad campaigns focusing on how they shred the printing plates, ensuring only one printing. Also, in a bold, crazy-ass move, each card would be given a unique serial number. On one hand, this sounds like a great idea to emphasize the low print runs they talked about in the magazine ads. But you see, something having a serial number doesn't mean that there isn't many of that particular item. Hell, a one dollar bill has a serial number, and there are hundreds of those. So instead of making it seem as though each Collector's Edge card was a unique treasure, these serial numbers had a very different effect:



They let you know that there were ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND of the card you had just gotten. Granted, that was probably way less than what just about any other set at the time had, but notice that I said "probably." That's because all the other brands were smart enough to keep the available numbers a secret. And that's why the '92 Collector's Edge Emmitt Smith that there are only a hundred thousand of is only worth a buck more than the 1992 Pinnacle one that there are like seventy trillion of.

1996 Pacific "The Zone" Inserts:



Like I've alluded to many times here, the 90s were a time of crazy-ass ideas, and one of the most popular was the die-cut card. They were different and neat-looking, but they've been mostly abandoned by now, because they usually just meant more corners to get all screwed up. But like I said, they looked cool, so I can't consider die-cut cards in general to be a stupid idea. But these. Oh man, these fucking things. Just in case you don't understand what's going on with these, take a look at that card up there. Those white areas above the arched Robert Brooks picture aren't part of the card; they're the white underside of the lid of my scanner. Okay. Now, with that in mind, look at the white areas above the black/gold foil Pacific Logo and underneath the yellow goal posts. Yeah, that's just my scanner, too. So what you have here is an entire set of fairly rare, fairly valuable (that Robert Brooks is worth 4 bucks, and he's not exactly Emmitt Smith or Brett Favre in terms of card value) set of cards, where the middle of the card is seriously about a centimeter across. And I understand that as card collectors over the age of five, we're expected to handle these damn things with some level of care, but god damn, just sliding one of those things into a top-loader without destroying the thing in horrible ways is like wrestling with the fucking devil. What the hell was Pacific thinking when they designed these? Oh, that's right:


"Duuuude, these new The Zone cards are kinda... Wait... Whoa, your head is HUGE."

Phone Cards



This was another early 90s "innovation" that was a pretty good idea until you thought about it for more than thirty seconds. You see, back before everyone on Earth had a cell phone and could call Guam for three cents a minute, people without actual long distance could by phone cards. These cards had either a set number of minutes or amount of money on them, and you could dial whatever number was on the card to use that until the card had been used up, at which point you tossed it and bought a new card. So somebody (I can't remember who was first, but I'm thinking it was either Classic or Upper Deck) got the idea of combining them with sports cards. On one hand this was cool, because it gave the cards a "real" value, as opposed to some imaginary one you looked up in a price guide. So finding that one Emmitt Smith phone card with $1500 worth of long distance on it was basically like finding a $1500 trading card. Ah, but that's where the conflict begins: Phone cards had expiration dates on them. So what do you do? Scratch off the silvery stuff on the back to expose the PIN number and use that $1500 of phone calls to Guam? Or just say fuck Guam and preserve the card, but lose that "real" value once the card expires? The aforementioned '95 Classic $1500 Emmitt Smith is worth $500 now, a net loss of $1000 in potential calls to grandma. It's a moot point anyway, I suppose, because they were hard as hell to find, and if you did find one, so chances are, it was going to be a $1-5 one, which basically meant like a minute and a half of talk time, tops. Which is also stupid.

1997 Playoff Absolute Chip Shots




These were a creative idea for an insert in packs of '97 Absolute that were unique in that they weren't cards at all. They were plastic poker chips with NFL players on them, and that's almost not a stupid idea. If they had waited a few years for the Texas Hold 'Em craze to take off, they could have really had something. Also, if they hadn't decided to make a one-per-pack insert into a set that included about two hundred chips, which meant that your chances of getting some shitty backup tight end were just as great as landing a superstar, and it would be effectively impossible for any sane person to collect a complete set, because even if you had the outlandish luck of never finding a duplicate, you'd still need to buy about two hundred packs of something that carried a price of about three bucks a pack. But the biggest reason these were fucking retarded was simple: They were fucking-ass poker chips. They were thick pieces of plastic packed in with thin pieces of cardboard. They made round indentations on whichever card was unfortunate enough to be directly underneath them in a pack, and they did the same to any other card they were around if you bothered to integrate them into your collection in any meaningful way. And you can't throw them away, because they're worth like seventy-five cents, and just having one means you're a dork who can't bear to throw something away that's "collectible" anyway. Chip Shots ruined my life, and if they had been around when I was younger, I'm certain that they would have raped my childhood.

I'll think of more of these eventually. Pacific existed as a company for more than a decade, so I've got plenty of material to work with.

Review: 1991 Fleer

"Well the way I used to love you baby; baby, that's the way I hate you now." - B.B. King

Well, before I start this trip down Memory Lane, I'd just like you to take a good, close look at that pack of cards up there. 53 cards for a buck ninety-nine. Holy fucking fuck. Today, $1.99 gets you six cards of something shitty. Back in 1991, it got you FIFTY THREE CARDS... Of something shitty.

In 1991, much like 1990, the first new cards of the season that we came into contact with were the new Fleer set. And riding high on fumes from the previous year's set, I decided before I even opened the pack that this would by MY set for the year. I'd buy it, and buy it, and buy it, until I had the full set, inserts and all. The problem was, the things were horrid. The colors were dull, the design was boring, (is that Times New Roman?) and what the Christ was up with with all the green? Topps had put out an all-green set in 1986, and I don't care if there was a zillion-dollar Jerry Rice or semi-rookies of all those USFL guys, that set was ugly as hell, too. But at least in '86, it looked like they were at least trying. This was just... Green box, white box, blah.

The card backs were almost decent, with a nice-sized headshot and graphics beyond colored boxes, but the dull green just ruined it again. But as far as boring card design goes, these might have been the ugliest cards I ever saw. Of course, as far as overall ugliness goes, the title would probably go to one of those nine thousand "let's see how much gimmicky bullshit we can cram onto a card" sets Pacific put out every year that eventually put them out of business, but that's a tale for another day. But yeah, the base card set sucked.

There were also some other subsets, like one for League Leaders and a nearly-identical one for "Hitters," which as you could have guessed, were some of the top defensive players. Buy yeah, those sucked ass, too. Rookies? Did Fleer possibly learn the lesson from 1990 and include more than four? Well, yeah. Ten of the fuckers. Yes, just ten. But surely, they'd be good right? Well, it's the 1991 draft class, so obviously no, but they'd at least have players people thought would be good, like first-rounders and stuff, right? Well... Russell Maryland was the first overall pick, and eventually made a Pro Bowl or two, so that'll do. Kenny Walker never amounted to much in the NFL, but he was deaf, and a big story as a result, so everyone wanted his cards. Derrick Walker was a sixth-round tight end, making his inclusion somewhat inexplicable, but he had a relatively productive career, starting most of the time. Nick Bell was an actual hot rookie card for a while, before fizzling out like all the other non-Favres of 1991. Eric Bienemy was a superstar at Colorado, and had a decent little NFL career. Okay, those will do, but then, it gets bad. Mike Dumas was a career journeyman who had a staggering seven interceptions in eight years. Derek Russell, a fourth round pick, had a decent year in 1993, but might as well have not existed otherwise. Okay, those two weren't horrible, but after the bad, it goes straight down to ugly, though. Michael Stonebreaker, a ninth round pick, only played in 18 games in four years, and wasn't in the NFL for two of those. But he did a helluva lot better than eighth round pick Patrick Tyrance and Motherfucking Eleventh round pick Chris Smith, neither of whom ever playing a single down in the NFL. Holy Christmas Jew, what the fuck were they thinking when they decided on those guys? "Okay, we got Maryland, Bell, and Bienemy... Should we put in Eric Turner, Herman Moore, or maybe that Favre guy? Eh, screw the first two rounds! PAT FUCKING TYRANCE! YEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!" Seriously, what the hell.


After the base set, things get a little better, though. The Fleer All Pro insert set returned, with us still being too ignorant of the way things were to understand that they were almost worthless, so they were still awesome. And making things way more awesome for me was that with four guys represented, (Neal Anderson, Mike Singletary, Mark Carrier, and Mark Bortz) my Bears had more players in the set than any other team, edging the three that the Bills and 49ers contributed. Hells yeah. A new addition, though, was the Pro Visions insert set, borrowing a design from '91 Fleer baseball, and featuring crazy-ass paintings of nine of the top dudes in the NFL. They were harder to find than All Pros, so we had way bigger boners for these than anything else in the '91 Fleer set, but it turns out that they were usually like thirty cents apiece, just like the All Pros. But hey, the Singletary looked like he was burning in hell, so there was at least a surrealism bonus there.


1991 Fleer fucked me, man, and it fucked me hard. I spent so much money on pack after pack of those things, trying to complete the set, and despite the coolness of the All Pros and Pro Visions, it was all a big, steaming pile of dog crap. And dog crap from a dog I didn't like, even. Nowadays, the full 432-card set runs you about eight bucks, at an average of about two cents a card. In 1991, that same eight bucks would get you four jumbo packs, totaling 212 cards. That's roughly four cents a card. So even with the price of a pack being insanely cheap compared to today, in the sixteen years that have passed, not only did these not skyrocket in value, but they're worth half the original retail price. Nice job, guys, seriously.

Review: 1991 Bowman

"You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright." - Bruce Springsteen

The year was 1991. Operation: Desert Storm was the big news item of the year, the last thing even slightly resembling a good Metallica album was released, and The Undertaker began his Wrestlemania undefeated streak that still stands. Meanwhile, the football trading card industry was about to explode. After brands like Pro Set, Score, Fleer, and Action Packed proved that the hobby could support multiple brands, more and more wanted in on the action. And along with new entries like Upper Deck, Pacific, Pro Line, and Wild Card, the existing companies all decided that maybe they could put out more than one set themselves. (More on that at a later date, probably) So after resurrecting the Bowman brand for baseball in 1989, the Topps company decided to do the same for football in 1991. But what did the new Bowman brand of cards have to offer that the regular Topps set didn't? I dunno, but I do know one thing: Our Wal-Mart had apparently ordered a metric fuckload of these things, so within a few months, they got as low as 20 cents a pack, so we all bought the living crap out of them.

Design-wise, they were really nothing special. While all the newer entries into the business had seemed to leave Topps in the dust as far as physical quality went, these were even a step down from the regular Topps set. The design was boring, the photo printing was dull and grainy, the cards were the same old-school Topps thick card stock that was all lumpy on the front and could get rounded off at the corners with even slight abuse, and the card backs were done in a two-color process that left most of the card area in an unprinted raw cardboard gray. It's a shame, too, because with better print quality, the fronts really would have looked okay, in a simple, stripped-down sort of way.


As far as player selection goes, I guess they did as much as they could with what they had to work with. Like I mentioned in the '90 Fleer review, overproduction had sucked all the potential value out of any standard-issue set of the time anyway, and most of the hot rookies of 1990 and 1991 really didn't pan out whatsoever. And like just about everyone else, they neglected to make a card of an unheralded rookie out of Southern Miss named Brett Favor, or something like that, so there went the one guy that could have saved the day, as far as book value is concerned. Still, this was a HUGE set with a lot of draft picks included, and they put a few guys in there that weren't in other sets, and were one of the very few to make a 1991 card of Shannon Sharpe. It's like a fifty-cent card, but hey, it's something, right?


Also included were special gold-foil stamped cards at a rate of one per pack. This was kind of a big deal, as foil on cards wasn't a very common thing back in those days, and these served as a precursor to the foil cards that were really hot in the 1992 set and to a lesser extent in 1993. These inclided subsets for star rookies, playoff game highlights, and league leaders. Sadly, these were viewed as a subset with less value than the player's standard-issue card, so they didn't generate a whole lot of interest among collectors. They looked kind of nice, though.


Overall, I shouldn't like this set, but I still do. 1991 Was kind of the last gasp for cards coming as a base set and nothing else, and as one of those sets, Bowman did everything it needed to. Sure, there was no Favre rookie, but at the time no one cared, as we all chased after the $1.25 (and that was big money at the time) cards of Todd Marinovich and Dan McGwire. The sad part is that we may be looking back with the same "boy, how stupid were we?" hindsight when Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler's careers go on horrible death-spirals and Brodie Croyle ends up being the new Football Jesus someday. Hey, it could happen.

Best Scam Idea Ever

I was talking to this dude at work today, and somehow, the subject of trading cards came up. On one end was me with my bullshit football cards and on the other was him and his extremely bullshit Magic: The Gathering cards. (Think Dungeons & Dragons, but without the use of thought or imagination, and yet still somehow way nerdier.) He was trying to make a point about how valuable the cards were, and dropped some bullshit line about some special Magic, Duel Masters, Yu-Gi-Blah, or whatever card being worth a million dollars. I called bullshit on that immediately, since it would be beyond insane for a ten year old or newer card from a card game to be worth more than the T206 Honus Fucking Wagner card. He countered by saying that the reason was that it was one-of-a-kind, to which I simply replied that it doesn't have an actual set value then, since it's only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, there have been lots of 1/1 cards made in the last few years, and none have gone for anywhere near that much. Granted, certain people are willing to pay a lot for stuff from collectible card games, but a million is ridiculous for reasons I was too nice to say out loud. What I wanted to say was that those games are designed for twelve year old kids, and twelve year olds tend to not have that kind of cash, due to labor laws, and a fully-grown adult whose life was enough of a ruin to want to spend large amounts of money on a game for twelve year olds would typically be someone who didn't make $18,000 a year, much less seven figures. And this guy I was talking to was a grown-ass man who does in fact spend large amounts of money on a game for twelve year olds and does in fact make less than $18 grand a year. Also, I didn't say that out loud, because I'm in a hella-glass house here. I mean, even if my monthly football card spending is typically around forty bucks, as opposed to the hundreds that guy blows on his own downfall, it's not as if collecting football cards is the highly-intellectual pursuit of virile masters of humanity.

But back to the point about valuable collectible card game type cards, I did stop and think that if stunted man-children like that can afford like two thousand for an Ebay-bought Playstation 3, they can probably scrape up quite a bit for Magic cards, so I did concede the point that someone would spend as much as a few grand on one of those things. Which is pretty retarded if you think about it. I mean, in sports cards, a lot has to go right for the card to be valuable. First and foremost, the player has to do well, which is completely out of the card companies' control. Like if Reggie Bush blows out both knees and is the drizzling shits for the rest of his short career, all those high-dollar cards of his will turn as worthless as all those Ricky Ervins, Penny Hardaway, and Pat Falloon cards your dumb ass spent so much money on in the early nineties. Second, the card itself has to be rare. Okay, that's not too hard; hell that makes it easier. But third, there has to be some other special condition to make people want the card. Maybe it's a swiftly-corrected error card, but that's usually not enough to do the job in the post-Fuckface era. The more likely situation these days is that it has an autograph or one or more pieces of some part of his equipment stuck to the card, or maybe even both. That shit costs money. And if it's one of those crazy cards with stuff like that from four guys, with two of them having played in the 20s and having died in the 70s, that costs HUGE money. All a card game card has to do to be worth big money is to be rare. That's all. A thousand-dollar Yu-Gi-Nagata card takes just as much trouble to make as a forty-cent common in a Donruss baseball set. The hell, man.

But this got me to thinking further, and I concocted the ultimate scam. So if you're reading this and you have connections to whoever makes Magic and Yogi-Bear cards, you should totally give them this idea. Step one: Make a card. And only make one copy, and make it where playing the card means you instantly win the game. Like you get the power up and win the game, and the other guy dies or whatever. Step two: Hype it up huge in all the magazines as the super ultimate one-of-a-kind chase card to end all chase cards, and get people totally pumped up to be the one to find that card. Step three, and this is important: For the love of God, don't put that card in the packs. Just hang on to it. Step four: Wait a while. Step five: Get an Ebay account under an alias that can't be connected to your card company and sell that bitch for like hella-thousands. Step six: Once you've spent your thousands on donuts and whores, repeat steps one through five. It's the secret to unlock nonstop cash money.

I am nothing if not the perfect criminal.

Review: 1990 Fleer

"Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in." - Al Pacino as Michael Corleone

It had been a while. While my interest in pro football remained as high as always, my interest in stupid pieces of thick paper had waned. I only bought a few packs of 1988 Topps, and by 1989, I was out of the hobby altogether, which was my bad for missing one of the most important years the business would ever have. (As well as missing a chance at the '89 Score Barry Sanders) But as I was starting to get too old to spend my money on toys, I had to have something else to throw the stuff away on. But video games were too expensive (Which reminds me, someday on one of the other bloggity things, I need to tell the horror story of my botched acquisition of Super Mario Bros. 3.) and I really had no desire to buy tapes at the time. (Because CDs were mystical strange things at the time, and even a crappy CD player cost at least like $100.) And there I was, with about twenty bucks of allowance to blow every month. What was I going to do with all this money? And in the Cleveland, Mississippi K-Mart, I found the answer:

What manner of witchcraft was this? Football cards? By FLEER!? Don't they know that only Topps can make those? Keep in mind that I had missed the entire festivities of 1989, so the thought of another brand doing football was strange to me, much less the thought of FIVE of them doing it. (For those of you who had better things to buy, Pro Set and Score debuted in 1989, and Action Packed joined the fun in 1990.) So there I was, with like two dollars in my hands, so I dropped about a buck ten and got a couple of packs. How could I not? I mean, it was the Premiere Edition! The first! That means they had to be worth a lot of money someday! Heh...


Now, with the benefit of hindsight and fifteen years of technological advances, it's funny to think just how far cards have come, especially when compared to how sad things were back in the old days. I mean, today a set like 1990 Fleer would seem quaint and charming with its caveman-like printing technologies. But back then, with me never having seen the higher-quality stuff Pro Set had been doing or the crazy bizarre shit Action Packed was about to unleash on the general public, these cards were a revelation. The card backs had more than three colors! And a PICTURE of the player! How crazy is that? And the fronts of the cards... They were smooth! Not like that lumpy crap Topps had always put out. Of course, Donruss, (who took a bizarrely long time to get into the football game) Fleer, and Score had higher quality stuff for years, but this was exciting and new for football. And hell, I don't think Fleer put player pictures on the baseball card backs until 1991 or so. But fast-forwarding to the present day, these were really not all that bad looking. The silver football is kind of busy, and there were some odd color choices, like the green on Washington Redskins cards, but they made it work somehow. It was certainly better than the disaster of the 1991 Fleer design, which I'll probably cover on here soon.


As far as player selection, overall, it wasn't too bad, but there was one huge problem. One of the things card companies had started to do (which, once again, was new and exciting to me since I had missed 1989) was to make cards of players drafted that year, before they had ever suited up in an NFL game. It's funny to think that such a thing was ever a novel concept, when it's damn near what the entire hobby is based on now. But making sure to not make the mistake Topps had made the year before, Fleer put draft picks in their set. Four of them. Yes, just four. But maybe they made up for quantity with quality, right? Well, as far as they knew when they originally made the set, yeah. But with even two years of hindsight? Oh god. Jeff George. Blair Thomas. Percy Snow. Andre Ware. Oh... Oh god.
Granted, they would eventually make up for the blunder with the 1990 Fleer Update, which was a damn-near impossible to find 120 card set with guys like Junior Seau, Rob Moore, and Emmitt Smith included, but it didn't help those of us who spent tens of tens of dollars on the main set. Especially since - like basically everything anyone put out in the early 90s - the 1990 Fleer regular set was overprinted to hell and back, eliminating even the slightest shadow of a hope of any of it ever being worth any money at all. I think the Rich Gannon rookie and a few of the usual suspects like Sanders, Marino, Elway, and Montana top the one-dollar mark, but there's not much past that. Nowadays, the entire set goes for about ten bucks, which is probably a bit generous. Bummer.

Speaking of value bummers, then there was the Fleer All Pro insert set. A set like this, being one that wasn't always a one-per-pack deal, (I think rack packs had one, though.) was something that really had never been done before, at least where football was concerned. Getting an All Pro in your pack was a big deal, and I and everyone else I knew who collected cards (Which was basically my brother and this dude Michael) valued those suckers like gold. Also, Beckett never listed them in the price guides, which added a strange sense of mystery to it all. So imagine our dismay when someone got one of those thick-ass yearly price guides that listed everything, and we found out that the goddamn things were basically worthless. Well, actually, they've increased in value over the years, but they're currently valued at 1.2 times the value of the guy's standard-issue card, which still means that the most valuable ones (Barry Sanders and Joe Montana) are worth like a dollar fifty, and half the set are still about a nickel apiece. Fuuuuuck.

The 1990 Fleer set probably sucks in the eyes of most collectors now, and they're probably right, for the most part. But with this being the one set I was determined to complete in 1990, (and I fell WAY short, although I think my brother got everything but a few All Pros) and with it being such a significant part of my spare time that year, this is probably my favorite set of 1990. That's basically how I remember that year: Sitting around, flipping through a yellow notebook of 1990 Fleer cards with spaces here and there for stuff I hadn't found yet, while someone around me was probably playing "Gamma World" (Think "Dungeons & Dragons," except with post-apocalyptic mutants instead of stuff from The Hobbit.) and listening to Seasons in the Abyss.
Good times. Sort of.

CARDBOARD DOWNFALL: THE INTRODUCTION

I believe that everybody's got a downfall, but not everybody finds theirs. Maybe they miss the school bus on the day they would have started hanging out with the kid who got them hooked on crack. Maybe they see an ad in the paper that they normally would have missed that somehow leads them on a path that doesn't involve being eaten by a bear. Who knows. But it ain't like that for me. I know what my downfall is; I've faced it, I've embraced it, I've spent thousands of dollars on it, and eagerly await the day when it sucks me into whatever dark abyss is waiting for me.

It all began as an innocent thing. Twenty years ago - 1987, if you suck at math - me and the rest of my family were on the way to go hang out with my uncle and do whatever it was that I can't remember doing when we went to hang out with my uncle. On the way, though, we took a detour to the Dodge's Store in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm not sure if you have those where you live, what with you being anonymous internet types for the most part, so if you were wondering, that's like a gas station, but with better fried chicken and a variation on a hot dog called a "Didger Dog" that my mom once told me I shouldn't eat, because one had made the uncle I mentioned earlier sick as hell one time. But gasoline, chicken, and hot dogs of questionable digestibility weren't all they had there. And on that day, the seven (or maybe six, I dunno, but I believe it was during the summer, which could mean seven) year old version of me headed down the candy aisle to look at tooth-rottening bullshit to pick out which item I was going to try and beg my dad to buy me, and it was there that I saw it. My downfall:

Fifteen cards. Fifty cents. Twenty years.

The crazy thing is that I can actually still remember some of the cards that came in that first pack of 1987 Topps. ("The Real One," in case you didn't know.) Hell, I even still have a few of them somewhere. But I can clearly remember Keith Millard, Gary Hogeboom, the special glossy "1,000 Yard Club" card of Al Toon, and what would eventually be an eleven-dollar Jerry Rice. The Rice should have been what got me, but it wasn't. It was The Fridge. William Perry, to the uncultured. I was only a year removed from doing the Super Bowl Shuffle, and the goofy, snaggle-toothed grin on card #55 was the siren's song that lured me in and eventually made the Fleer company a ton of money they didn't deserve, which is a story I'll get to later. But from that point on, aside from pauses in 1989 and a period between 1998 and 2005, I would both cherish and regret the day Refrigerator Perry took advantage of a small boy.

In the days, weeks, and months to come, until I get bored with this thing, I'll try to tell you the tale of my losing battle with addiction. I'll tell you of the highs and lows of my $10-a-week habit, of the joys of finding that hot new rookie card, the heartbreak of creases, and why Ricky Ervins can kiss my ass.

I got nothing better to do.