Basement Find: 1986 and 1987 Fleer Baseball Mini Sets

Part of my basement find were the 1986 Fleer Mini and 1987 Fleer Mini baseball sets.  There are 120 cards in each set with the '86 set having 16 stickers and the '87 set having 18 stickers.  I'm not a mini guy but maybe I was back in the day.  I don't remember picking them up but that was a long time ago.  These are up for trade.  I may not get them out until the beginning of August but just let me know.  It was fun looking through these sets as the players from this ear are huge in my baseball fandom and baseball card collective as a whole.

Some of my favorites from the era.  The '86 set was in order by team rank order from the previous season so Royals and Cardinal players were the first two teams in that order.  I always liked how Fleer did that.

Nice photo of Reggie hitting in his Angels uni.  He really only had one good year with the Halos but he was still mashing.

Some more greats from the eighties.

The '87 set ordered the players by last name.  Not sure why Fleer departed from their norm.  The regular sized set still had the players grouped by team based on the previous year's finish.

That's a good photo of Dwight Gooden.  There didn't seem to be as many action shots in the '87 set compared to the '86.

Just had to get Mark Langston and his hair in the post.  These were all fun to look at but I won't be keeping them.  There are some individual cards I like but again minis aren't my thing.  Side note:  I'm on twitter if anyone is interested at Bulldog2189.

  

Basement Find: 1995 Score Football

As part of this week's basement find was around 650 1995 Score Football cards.  Like the '95-'96 Fleer Ultra Basketball cards I have no idea where these came from.  I was not familiar with this set before now but I really like these cards.  The photos are sweet and I had a really tough time deciding on which one to lead with but settled on this Jerry Rice beauty. 

    Elway is an all-time favorite and I really like the photo on this card.  The design is pretty simple letting the photos take up most of the card while still giving us a nice sized team logo.

 Again a great photo with this one being a classic pose of Deion.  Definitely my favorite card of his outside of hin wearing a Falcons uni.  This 49ers jersey is my favorite San Francisco jersey which helps.

   So much fun seeing all the all-time greats in this set.  Again the photos and design really do it for me.

These Star Struck are a subset of the base cards.  Not my favorites as the blank background is "meh" and the close up cropped photos at times made it tough to recognize who the player is.  These are a couple of the better examples.

The Pass Time cards are inserts.  They are shiny gold on the front.  Nice looking cards and the backs are just as good with an additional two photos.

The backs are great showcasing a new color photo and nice stats.  This Irvin and Deion is an example of many of the nice photos to be found on these backs.  Offense Inc is another another insert set which is pretty cool.  Plenty of rookies here with Warren Sapp being the most notable.

  There are checklist cards for the Chase Program cards (inserts) and the base cards.  Both of these have really nice photos on the fronts which is a great bonus as opposed to standard checklists you find so often that have none.  The base card checklists are divided into NFC and AFC checklists with appropriate conference stars on the front.  I don't think I've ever seen that before.

Some of the stars of the day.  1994 was Sterling Sharpe's last season before injury cut his career short.  He was so great and an All-Pro in 5 of his 7 seasons.  

Plenty of defensive greats from the era as well.

I really like how the players take up the majority of the card and photos really stand out.

Wait, what?  Bryan Cox arguing with a referee?  Love those creamsicle unis!  Great photo on that O.J. McDuffie Card.

These were such a great find.  I really enjoy these cards and it was so fun going through them all.

Greatest uni ever!  This was before the stringent helmet rules made it so hard to wear different color retro uniforms.  I so want to see the Falcons wear these again.  There were a few other cards to include subsets and inserts that had players wearing retro unis which is always fun.

BREAKDOWN:
650 – Total Cards (Approximately)
64 – Rookie
62 – Star Struck
15 – Checklist
13 – Red Siege
2 – Offense Inc.
2 – Chase Program Checklist
2 – Pass Time

Basement Find: 1995-1996 Ultra Fleer Basketball Cards

We've lived here now for eight years.  Our house has no garage so our unfinished basement is pretty full with boxes of stuff that hasn't ever been unpacked.  We've started working on cleaning up the basement this week and this is part of the fun I've found.  I have no clue where these 1995-1996 Fleer Ultra basketball cards came from but they are are a fun find and they are in good shape which is never a given.  There were three of these Kevin Garnett rookie cards in the lot which is great.  I've recently added him as PC guy but honestly don't have many cards of his and this is my first rookie card of his.  

The base card design gives plenty of room for the photos but I can't say all the photos are that good.  That Payton is a good one but Hakeem does not look like a dream.  Seems like they could have zoomed out a bit on many of their pictures.  Only thing missing in the design would be the team logo.

 Again many of the photos just don't click for me.  Eddie Johnson is an all-time favorite of mine so I enjoyed finding him in the stack.  I'm sure Glen Rice is about to drain a three.  Could you imagine him in today's game?  He hit quite a few threes back in the day but I think he'd have quite a few more opportunities today.

The Encore subset are my favorites cards from those I found.  While the photos are in the same mode as the base cards these work better for me.  Maybe it is the background being muted in black and white.  I didn't have the base card for PC guy Detlef Schrempf but I'm happy with this Encore of his.

That Hardaway really sticks out.  Camera guy was able to get a full body shot.  Whose Hardaway yelling to?  Mullin?  Richmond?  Sprewell?

These were all inserts.  I like that USA card.  I may chase down more of those.  Stackhouse's Scrapbook seemed an odd choice for a insert set to me but I know he was a big name coming out of college.  Just don't see him scrapbooking...

The backs have not one, but three different photos from those on the front.  They take up a ton of space so the stats are minimized but still I've seen much worse backs.  These are colorful and we get a nice logo.  Speaking of, we see logos on the fronts of the expansion Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies cards which are different in style from the normal set base cards.  Not a bad design and I like how they are differentiated within the set.  The Damon Stoudamire card I really like showcasing that sweet uni.  This was a fun find.  I'll show off some other cards I found later.  Now I'm excited to get back into the basement.  Who knows what else I'll find?

BREAKDOWN:

99 – Total Cards

31 - Encore
24 – Rookie
5 – Toronto Raptors
3 – Vancouver Grizzlies
1 – USA
1 – Jam City
1 – Stackhouse’s Scrapbook