Up first, is my first villified set with arguably the most villified player of this era.
Look to the left. Now adjust your sight for any purple spots. This was Pacific's first foray into the premium market in 1995. I believe, according to their license at the time with MLB, they could release two bilingual baseball sets per year.
Design: The design was a "prismatic" foil backfround with the player image superimposed onto it; it's practically epilectic when you move the card around. The Pacific crown logo was in the upper left corner. The name was in foil inside a team-specific colored box. The back was bilingual (cool).... with no stats ( very not cool) on a rainbow background with a player headshot in the corner.
Details: 1995 Pacific Prisms was distributed in 36 pack boxes with 2 cards per pack (one Prism and one team logo) for a SRP of $1.79. The base set was 144 cards with the major stars and semistars of the day. There were no rookies of note.
Impact: None, except on the wallet. Even though this did spawn other shiny, no substance sets in the future. There were no insert sets worth chasing with the only one being a one per pack team logo, which is not even desirable in 2009.
Summary: Just by looking at this set, you could tell it's trying to say, "Don't leave me behind; I can be a worthwhile card too. Check out this rainbow effect." But in reality, this set was not for high-end (or so-called premmium) collectors of the day (or now) because it was likely you were not going to receive a star card in a pack. In fact, the odds were against you getting one. In addition, there was no scarcity component involved at all in any aspect of the set.
For set collectors, it would require a minimum of 4 boxes without duplicates to amass this miasma-inducing set because of the one card per pack configuration. On the plus side there weren't one thousand parallels. However, the design and value held it back then as it does now. I have two cards from this set, both from 10 cent boxes at card shows....in 1995. Why buy a pack at all?
1 comment:
I had a complete set of 1990-1991 NBA Hoops cards. Initially I was excited to tear open the packs to try to find the Michael Jordan card but my favorite part was finding David Robinson's rookie card and discovering that he has the same birthday as me.
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