From: stretz@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Stretz)
Newsgroups: rec.collecting
Subject: Re: Cards: Wild Card - College Basketball
Date: 15 Apr 92 22:18:40 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

In article <1992Apr15.183035.9247@nic.unh.edu> jsp@kepler.unh.edu (Jeffrey S Passen) writes:
>Has anyone seen these?  I bought a few packs yesterday, and not
>knowing what to expect, I was pleasently surprised.  The are high
>quality cards (Stadium Club like) that have photos of current NBA 
>players when they were in college, plus just regular college players.

If you hadn't heard of Wild Card before, they came out with College football
last fall, and then NFL football.  The college basketball came out late
because wild card received a license for the NFL football cards and that
pushed the basketball down a few months.  I was also surprised about the
"High Quality" of the Wild Cards.  The cards stock, graphics, surface quality
and even the wild card idea prompted me to collect these cards.  With football,
however, I think I'm overall disappointed due to their terrible colation and
lack of random pack sequencing.  I once bought 6 packs from a box and ALL 6
packs had the same cards in them!  Not to mention, I bought a box and still
didn't complete a set of only 160 cards.  I got burnt out on Wild Card!

The "Quality" of these cards was diminished in my eyes because of damaged
cards.  Alot of the cards I opened had lots of nicks and bent edges.  I also
noticed that certain players always had the same flaw.  Some of these I
can overlook, but a High quality card that consistently comes out of the
pack with a crease on the edge is annoying.

With the basketball cards I am disappointed in the photography.  The photos,
in general, IMHO (Did I say I was a Photo major) are very LOW quality and
counterbalance the other nice features of the cards.  Lastly, I dont like
the fact that they included former/current NBA players in there college
uniform.  Theres already too many cards of NBA players, and I feel like
Wild Card did this just to 1) complete a set, 2) to try to make the set
interesting.  Besides, its digusting (and tacky) that they air-brushed
the photos of NBA players so you cant see their uniform (what team they
played for).

These are just my opinions and in Wild Cards defense they did send me 2 packs,
a Barry Sanders, and a promise to fix the problems when I informed them of
my bad experiences and included 1 of the most-creased cards from a pack I
opened.  In fact I was excited about the basketball until I saw the poor
quality photo's.

>
>There are "Wild Cards" inserted randomly (so they say) plus cards
>that have a stripe with a certain number (5,10, 50, 100, 1000) in
>which you may send in and get that many of that card.

There is also a 10 card RED HOT ROOKIE subset in the basketball, about
one per box (I think).

Some places have standing offers for the 1000 Larry Johnson and Mutombo
for $4-5000 a piece.

>
>There were only 30,000 cases produced, each case with 15 boxes.

I like the fact that they publish production quantities, but since they back
up all those stiped cards, does that mean they have a huge warehouse full of
cards.  Or are they going to crank up the machines periodically?

>
>Let me know what you think.

BTW there is still some College and NFL football out there if you're
interested: which makes me think the limited production didnt increase the
demand.

Good Luck, and I hope you have better experiences than I had.

Rob
stretz@u.washington.edu