Card Collecting Part 2

Card Collecting Part 1

Once I had acquired a taste for card collecting, I wanted to keep going. During my frequent visits to the card shop, the owner would introduce me to new sets. The next one I had my eye on was the Flair Marvel set. Flair was an imprint of Fleer, and were their highest quality products. These cards were made/colored in Photoshop or some other computer program, used cardboard that was easily at least twice as thick, and had a very nice slick UV coating on them. Instead of coming in foil wrapped packs, these came in small cardboard boxes.

Like the previous set, there were 150 cards, but only 18 special foil cards. As I recall, I was able to get all of the cards without too much issue and only had to trade with a friend-of-a-friend once for a particular special card.

However, unlike the previous set, this one was not X-Men only. The set was a celebration of the biggest and most memorable events in the Marvel comics universe up to that point. Examples include character/team debuts, character deaths (like Gwen Stacy), crossovers, major stories (like the Phoenix Saga), and many other snippets of the 30 year history of these characters. These cards expanded my knowledge of the Marvel Universe quite a bit, and allowed me to feel at ease about buying a comic book in that I would probably know who a majority of the referenced characters were now. 

Around this time my mom became concerned about how much money I was spending on these silly little cards. I reassured her that I was being responsible - in fact, it was precisely because of these cards and how I hated being broke 28 days out of the month that I forced myself to learn how to budget. Anyway, my weak defense was that they were worth something and that I could sell complete sets to recoup the money for things like college or going to Japan. The concept of comics as investments had been in the news recently so I defaulted to that. She asked to whom and how would I go about doing such a thing. I didn't have an answer, but found one years later - eBay (though I had obviously overestimated their projected value and demand). 

The third set I collected was the 1994 Marvel Universe set. It had 200 cards in the set, with a variety of solo cards and 9-card page sets telling a complete story arc in one picture. This set had some holographic cards, and I happened to get one on my very first pack. There were only 4 of them, and I had spectacularly good luck getting those particular ones. Besides these there were the usual Powerblast cards, but these came in 3 varieties and were a pain to collect. Packs from Wal-Mart came in a gold variety, packs from a hobby shop (like the Card Shop) came in silver, and anyplace else had "rainbow" versions. The collector in me decided that I needed all 3 so I eventually did it. They also had something called "Suspended Animation," which were on transparent plastic and were double sided (it was supposed to emulate a celluloid animation frame). 

Another one I got was the Marvel Masterpiece set. These were a set of 150 cards that had the most popular and relevant characters that were in the stories in the comics from the recent years. Each card had more character history and facts on it, but what was unique was that the entire set was painted by the same duo – the Hildebrandt Brothers – so there weren’t various styles from card to card like previous sets.

There were 10 special holofoil cards, but they each came in three flavors (like the last set) - gold, silver, and bronze. Because I was chasing a complete set of 30 of these holofoils, I ended up buying enough cards to do almost 3 full normal card sets. I gifted one to my brother Matt, hoping he would use it to get more into the comics side of things (it didn’t work so well). There were also 9 other Powerblast cards that I almost collected 2 full sets of during my pursuit of the 30 holofoils.


With four full sets of Marvel/X-Men cards, I had spent quite a bit of time and money on them. They became like my pride and joy, and I pored over them for hours reading the information and admiring the artwork. I learned quite a bit about the characters, but learned that I quite like collecting things. I made sure to have them in the best kinds of binders using the best kinds of pages and other ways of preserving them so nothing became ruined. 

Card Collecting Part 3