Picked Up A Grail Card For My Griffey Collection

 Hi! Wow, so 8 years since my last post, huh? Did I miss anything? I'm sure not much happened while I was away, I feel like it's been a pretty boring near-decade....

Anyhoo, I thought maybe it was time to fire up the ol' blog again. I have no idea if I'm still on the blog roll or not, so if you are reading this maybe you could do me a solid and just say hi in a comment? It would be nice to know if anyone is actually seeing this post! 😄

And now, on to the actual point of the post - I managed to get my hands on a Griffey card that I've been trying to get since before I even started this blog in the first place!! 

I've loved the 1998 Pinnacle Epix cards since they first came out. It has always been a dream of mine to get all the Griffeys, but I've been stuck trying to track down the Purple and Emerald Season cards that came out of 1998 Zenith for years. Scratch one off the list!

With the addition of that purple beauty, I've only got one more left to go.

Apparently one of the Emerald Season cards was actually sold on eBay recently.....for $350. I suppose that price is unsurprising, given that Pinnacle only made 30 of those cards to start with. Add to that the odd gimmick Zenith had that year with regular cards hidden inside of 5×7 cards, and there are almost certainly less than 30 out there in the wild. But, maybe someday....

It's good to be back. I hope to hear from some of you soon!

Epix Success~!

I've written about the 1998 Pinnacle Epix cards a couple times before.  They rank very highly in my favorite sets of all time list.  For YEARS I've been trying to finish off my Griffey set.  Which is why when I recently did one of my regular "Griffey Epix" searches on eBay I almost fell out of my chair when I finally saw a Griffey Emerald Game card pop up. The Emerald Game is the last** card I needed to finish the set, and it was only $11 to boot - BUY BUY BUY BUY~!

A few days later I got one of those familiar brown envelopes in the mail.  I excitedly tore into it and saw.....

A card that was clearly NOT an Emerald.

I contacted the seller immediately and told him he sent the wrong card.  Evidently he LISTED the wrong card, as he didn't have an Emerald Game to send me.  He refunded my money right away and let me keep the card too, but still, I was crushed.  Who knew when another Emerald Game listing would show up?

As it turns out, the answer to that question was "the very next day."

Unbelievably, another listing popped up on eBay for a Griffey Emerald Game Epix.  This one wasn't buy it now, and I got in a bit of a bidding war so I had to pay $24 this time around, but this time when I opened the mail I saw this:

And it's MINT too!

FINALLY, I have the full set of nine~!**

Check one off my collection bucket list!


**The asterisks are because technically there is more to this set.  As I talked about in one of my old posts, there was supposed to be a fourth subset, Epix Season, that was to be included in 1998 Pinnacle Certified.  The company went bankrupt so the set was never released.  However, some of the Epix Season cards made it out onto the market somehow.  I've actually got the Griffey Epix Season Orange too!

I saw a Griffey Epix Season Emerald on eBay once years ago (for $100), so I know that at least one copy of that card exists.  I've never seen a Griffey Epix Season Purple though.

New Additions to the Griffey Collection

I made a couple of long sought after additions to my Griffey collection in the last couple weeks:

First, one of the Epix Season Griffeys from 1998 Pinnacle.  This is one of my all-time favorite insert sets, and I was thrilled to get a chance to pick up one of the rare Season versions.  I actually was talking about this set in one of my recent posts - my understanding is that the Epix Season cards were supposed to be inserted into a Pinnacle set that was never released because the company went bankrupt.  No one seems to know exactly how these cards made it into the market, though one website I found thinks that some of the soon-to-be axed employees made off with some boxes of cards as a form of backdoor compensation (pure hearsay, take it for what you will).  I would suspect that some of the cards were purchased as part of a bankruptcy liquidation sale, but another site said their undistributed cards were ordered destroyed.  (Again, I have no proof of this, just the word of an anonymous person on the internet).  I've got three more to go until I've got the full Epix Griffey set - Emerald Game, Purple Season, and Emerald Season.

The other 2 big additions also came from 1998 Pinnacle (I've got to figure out a better way to take these pictures.  Stupid camera flash...):

Pinnacle Spellbound letters "R" and "F" #1.  I've always loved the "dufex" style cards, they look really awesome in person.  But the REAL reason I'm excited about getting these 2 cards is because.....

...I now have the full G-R-I-F-F-E-Y set~!  (Crummy picture, I know).  That's one off the wish list!


An Epix Return

The 2010 Panini Epix Football set marked the return of one of my all-time favorite insert sets - the Epix series:



This picture really doesn't do justice to how cool these look in person.  Admittedly, I tend to be a sucker for "ooh, shiny!"-type inserts, but these really are awesome.  The only downside came when I learned how big the set is - there are 100 cards, and each one has 7 versions (various combinations of three names - Game, Moment, and Season - and colors - Orange, Purple, and Emerald).  When I first saw these had returned I was excited by the prospect of collecting a whole set, but 700 is a bit much.  Perhaps I'll just try to get one of each of the 100 players instead...

This actually isn't the first time I've been caught off guard by the number of Epix variations.  I fell in love with these cards when they first appeared in Pinnacle baseball sets back in 1998, and I always wanted to get a full set of the Ken Griffey Jr. Epix cards.  I figured it shouldn't be hard, I mean there's only 9 of them - Game, Play, and All-Star Moment, each in Orange, Purple and Emerald versions.

(random voice in the back) - "What about the Epix Season cards??"

Me - "Epix Season?  There was no Epix Seas-"

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

Thus far I've only ever seen one of Griffey's Epix Season cards listed on eBay - the Emerald version - and it was selling for $100, so I had to pass for now.  My understanding is that the Epix Season cards were supposed to be inserted into a set that never got released because Pinnacle went bankrupt, but some of them found their way onto the market later when the company's assets were sold off.  If anyone knows more about the details of where these came from, I'd love to hear about it!