I stopped collecting at the year 2000 for two reasons, I had to cut things off somewhere and there was an explosion in number of sets and parallels that made things nearly unmanageable around that year. Fleer wasn’t as bad as some companies, but you still had Tradition, Focus, Force and Mystique. And each of these has so many insert sets attached to it.
You’re looking at a Lamar Odom card from an insert set from Fleer Force called Special Forces. There are fifteen of these cards as you can see from the “2 of 15 SF” card number. But the players seem to be selected haphazardly. Lamar Odom was a rookie this year and he is included with players like Karl Malone and Kobe Bryant. So the selection is all over the place with the one unifying feature being that the players are all “special,” hence the name of the set. The text is really forced here. Fleer used the “S” of the Special Forces name and tried to make a connection to some generic characteristics of Odom’s playing and the word “Superman.” Nothing of substance really.
These were inserted 1:12 packs. And to make matters worse in terms of number of cards in 1999-00, there is a parallel version of even this insert set. Fleer Force called their parallel set “Forcefield” and the Forcefield version of this insert card is 1:48 packs. And Fleer Force was already basically a parallel of Fleer Tradition except they added this neat foil texture to the backgrounds. Do you see why I felt things were getting overly complicated in the hobby?
What do I like about this card? The metallic foil texture of the red-foil front is really neat. It’s like a texturized matte finish with the player standing out glossy and clear. Really cool in terms of look and touch.
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