[lampertb]

Originally Posted by ParisianJohn

The very first baseball cards I ever bought with my own money were 1987 Sportflics cards hen I was 11 years-old. Back in early 1987 they sold for $0.65 per pack, which included 3 player cards and 2 team cards. I bought about 25 packs and somehow only pulled 4 doubles - not bad considering the whole set only had 200 player cards.

I decided to get myself the complete set and recently picked one up for around $10 - which is way less money than I spent in 1987 for about a third of the set.

I had a lot of fun flipping through them and trying to remember the players by face before checking on the back of the card. I know it's gimmicky, but I still love rotating the cards a little bit to get the motion effect. I also still like to scratch my finger nail against the grain of the card and make a little squeaky sound. Since they only produced 200 cards you got only the better players, so a high ratio of HOFers.

If you're unfamiliar, Sportflics were a set of cards put out from 1986-1990 that were called "magic motion". On a thick card stock the front of the card had 3 images of one player, and as you turned the card the image changed so you'd get 3 pictures of someone swinging a bat or throwing a ball - kind of like stop-motion. The backs of the cards had the player's name, stats, a small blurb and a color headshot picture - the first card to do this.

For whatever reasons (high price, looked gimmicky, entered the market when it was too saturated to stand out, etc.), Sportflics never caught on. I still had fun looking through mine this week! And yes, I also still have the third of the set that I collected in 1987 and ran out of money trying to chase down.

Ha! I haven't thought about these cards in 30 or so years, but yes, I too discovered them in '87. Topps was still king of '87 for me, though.