OK, so it’s not the Bird/Magic rookie with Dr. J, but this was still an exciting insert set. Upper Deck’s Collector’s Choice was geared toward young collectors on a budget and now it was our turn to collect something that hadn’t been seen since 1980-81 Topps, three mini-cards in one card! Just like the earlier Topps, these cards were perforated, so they could be separated. I doubt very many collectors did this though. There are actually two Series of these mini-cards, one in each series of ’96-97 Collector’s Choice. Unlike the 264 different players who repeat multiple times in the ’80-81 Topps set, these sets were a lot simpler. Both Series I and II are 30 cards featuring 90 players appearing once, together making a total of 60-cards and 180 players. (A bit of trivia though…if you’re actually looking at the small numbers on each card, you’ll get frustrated searching for M106 because it’s not there! There was an error and they used M112 twice!)
These came one in every pack, so they were very collectible. But more valuable was a parallel gold set inserted at 1:35 packs. This is the highlight of all the minis, the gold Jordan/Hardaway/Kemp card. Worth around $10 nowadays, it is much more valuable to me. So excited when I pulled it! Definitely one of my favorite cards, especially since Collector’s Choice didn’t do parallels like Silver Signature or Player’s Club this year. I was thrilled to find this Jordan parallel.
Team names are at the top, player name is at the bottom and a team color is used with this design reflected on both the front and back of the card. The reverse shows that, impressively, each mini-panel really was treated as a separate card. All three have their own individual Upper Deck hologram logos and copyright info squeezed into this space! And they didn’t skimp with information either. Here, it is mentioned that Jordan earned his eighth scoring title and another MVP award after returning from his retirement. Hardaway was the only player in the league to average at least 20 points, five assists and have a greater than 50% shooting percentage per game, and Shawn Kemp played his fourth All-Star game trailing Jack Sikma in appearances for the Sonics (Sikma had seven).
What’s neat about these groupings is that they usually had some kind of theme. For example Stacy Augmon/Larry Johnson/Greg Anthony formed a group because they were all former UNLV players. These themes don’t correspond to the headings on the cards, they’re just information about awards. The UNLV card doesn’t have headings and you can see this Jordan/Hardaway/Kemp shows “1996 NBA MVP/and two 1996 NBA All-Stars” respectively.
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