Today we are looking at another card from the second Flair basketball set, 1995-96. Flair wanted to limit this set to, “recognized starters and top players off the bench” so there wasn’t as may cards this year, only 150 in Series I and 100 in Series II. But Flair didn’t skimp on rookies, making sure to include 30 in the Series II set (#199-228). The #206 Kevin Garnett rookie is definitely the landmark rookie card and may even be the key card in the whole set.
The rookies are a distinct subset that differ in design from the base cards. Keeping the rookies together as a subset with a slightly different design also gave Flair more structure and variety in 1995-96. The previous year, the rookies are scattered throughout the set with their respective teams. So some of the important changes between the design of Flair’s first basketball set, 1994-95 and this second set 1995-96, don’t hold for the rookie cards. The main difference between the two was the foil-etched design of 1995-96. The rookies do not have this, making them closer in appearance to 1994-95. In this case, it is nice that Flair included the season above the brand logo on their cards. The name and initials are only in gold foil on the rookies. Silver is not used on the initials. Both of these design choices allow the rookies to have a simpler, more classic feel to them. The backs of the rookie cards are very nice from a design perspective. There are no college statistics, so a nice simple paragraph of information appears. And the Kevin Garnett paragraph really made you excited for the future of this player! They also had a nice idea to change the black section of the reverse to a team color, green in the case of the Kevin Garnett. This caused a really neat affect with the rookies…they were simpler cards on the front, but contained a bit more color and variety on the back when compared to the whole set!
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