What lies below is the*unveiling of some cards you have likely never seen before.* In addition to this is the absolute craziest deal I have ever been a part of!
If you ask seasoned hardcore collectors, they will tell you the 1990s inserts/parallels are where it's at. *The best of the best? *Across the board, you will likely hear about 1996 Select Certified Mirror Gold, 1997 Pinnacle Totally Certified Platinum Gold, 1998 Donruss Red Crusade, among others. *These are *true* white whale cards for collectors. *With*only 25-30 of each having been printed, some of these cards have been dreamed about on*want lists for nearly 2 decades. *Coupled with their absolute beauty, these cards can potentially go for a lot of money, and even surpass today's ultra high-end 1/1 auto patch cards.
But what about the cards that aren't supposed to exist?
Cards that were on sell sheets and were never made, due to bankruptcies and such. *The*beautiful inserts/parallels that could have been, but weren't ... unless for some strange reason they actually were made AND not destroyed. *(How many employees were actual collectors and had the foresight to NOT use the cards as coasters?)
So that, boys and girls, is where we start our story.
My introduction to Prototypes
Back around 2013-14, a good friend and fellow collector showed me this beauty in his collection:
What you are looking at is a 1998 Pinnacle Certified Red Jose Canseco. *The odds are, you probably have not seen this before, or any other type of card like it.* Whenever I see it, I hear angels singing. *This, among others like my 1992 Ultra Boardroom prototypes, 1989 Topps Gold border and others are what really started to get me passionate about owning cards that shouldn't exist.
We have done many deals together, where 1/1s have come to me and been sent from me to*him, but the 98 Pinnacle Test*card was never on the table. *Not for 1/1s, not for anything.* I have always dreamed of owning that card, but knew it would be impossible as it was seen as a unicorn, white whale (insert whatever term you want for untouchable card here).
The mystery surrounding these types of cards add to the desire, and with it come many questions. *How did they come to market? *How many are there? *The market can be incredibly strange with these, as nobody really knows how to price them, since they aren't even supposed to exist. *The checklisted rare inserts & parallels have enjoyed an established value which has been trending upward for the past several years.* The mystery surrounding them has kept many a collector up at night trying to research them, only to walk away from their computer with nothing to show for their efforts. *Because of the lack of data and history, this*can cause people to hesitate pulling*the trigger with the kind of money a checklisted rare 90s card would fetch.
For the 1998 Pinnacle Certified cards, this is about to change. *They are about to be checklisted in Beckett AND I have the story
Not only do I have the story, but the turn of events for what I'm about to tell you is the absolute CRAZIEST thing I've been a part of.
The Craziest Deal I've Ever*Experienced
Lets rewind back to last Friday. *I was about to check out of the office for the week from where I spend my days saving the world from bad web design, and checked eBay. *What popped up caused my heart to skip a beat. *Over, and over, and over....
It was NOT the 1998 Pinnacle Certified Red.
It was the 1998 Pinnacle Certified MIRROR Red.* The seller had listed most,*if not all the cards from the set.
Folks, this card has never been seen before, and in spite of my NUMEROUS attempts to reach out, the seller was not responsive at all, which was very frustrating. *I had so, so, soooo many questions. *This card was on my mind more times than I care to admit over the next few days. *It truly occupied more brain space than any other card that I can remember in recent history! *To me, this was a BETTER card than the one I had held in such high regard, and it was right in front of me, on eBay.
And then Sunday came.
The Let Down
I checked eBay to see what the bidding was up to and it was nowhere to be found! *I looked all over the place, and saw the dreaded listing ended post.
Upset, (again, more than I care to admit over a piece of cardboard), my mind was racing with what had happened, and how I could get in touch with the seller to know more, when he was clearly too busy to contact me. *(Before I go any further, please don't take my retelling of the story as the seller being a jerk or shady. *I was able to finally talk to him and he seems like a nice/pleasant fellow with fantastic cards.)
As you can see, the seller is in Texas.* After driving to pick up my son from church in the evening, I was racking my brain over how I can figure out this guy's phone number, email address, etc. just so I can somehow open up dialogue.* As I pulled into the church parking lot, I had an epiphany.* I will call a guy I know who is also in Texas (about 4 hours away from me) to see if he knows the seller & has his contact information.
Throwing a Hail Mary
Have you ever had someone from out of state find out the state you live in, and they say "You live in Texas? *I know a guy named Mike from there! *Do you know him?" *Uhhhmm...there are like eleventy billion Mikes in Texas.
This felt like the same thing to me. *I *almost* felt foolish asking, but desperate times, desperate measures, right? *Please keep in mind this person I texted for the contact information is someone I had not spoken to in about two years, which was only a brief text or two. *The last time I've seen him was over three years ago. *He would buy hundreds of thousands of cards from me. *As a matter of fact,
I wrote about that here back in December of 2014.
The pic above shows the carnage of after he left
*Part of the deal is he did not want ANY box tops, so I had a literal mountain of them in my garage for a while. *The weird part about this is I was JUST telling this story to someone I picked up a collection from the day before I wrote him! *(Here is what I picked up this past weekend, by the way!) *This is the first deal I have picked up to re-sell in quite a while. *I am very excited about going through it all, but this deal caused me to push pause on it for a while. *#thecardboardmobileridesagain!
So needless to say, I knew the text to this guy I hadn't talked with in forever was a long shot, but as it turns out, he knew the guy personally and deals with him from time to time! (What are the odds?)* The spark of hope that I could obtain the card was fairly quickly snuffed out, but the very next day I received a text from*the guy that came over years back.
"Tanner, shoot me a picture of the card you were asking about."
I thought this was an odd request, but went ahead and did it.
"I have that card."
I stared at my phone for a while, with my mind racing.* He has that card?* Is he messing with me?* No, he wouldn't do that.* He probably means he has a card like it.* Maybe the '97s where they made several*of them.* No, he doesn't have this card.* There. is. no. way.
A Needle in a Haystack ... Factory
To give you an idea of how outlandish this is, I have gone many times to the largest annual card show to search for Canseco cards I don't have, and simply put:* none of the hundreds of dealers have ANYTHING I don't have.* Heck, eBay seldom has anything I don't have these days, aside from the latest and greatest release at any given time.
For this person to have THE card I was looking for (a card that shouldn't exist, mind you) - a person that I just decided to reach out to on a whim ... what are the odds?
Now, people.* Let me explain something to you.* I have folks coming up to me every now and then telling me they have something amazing, and I either don't hear back from them again or they apologize and tell me it isn't what they thought.* I figured this was going to be a prime example of the latter. *You know me - whenever my dreams are dashed, I tend to create fantasy custom cards that don't exist. *I did these last year of 1998 Select. *(The set was never released, and Jose was never in it anyway, but it was a fun project to work on!)
.......continued below .....