As requested in the comments section of one of my HOST posts, here is the Shaquille O'Neal Xplosion parallel from 1998-99 Molten Metal.
I hear this is a fairly rare card. I pulled it from a pack. I never did a box of this set and I don't have a whole lot of it. I have I think 6 of these metal parallels, which were pretty unique when they came out. I know that I added one or two of them as singles. I picked them up when I saw them but it was rare.
I sincerely doubt that Shaq hated to face the Grizzlies...at the time they were one of the worst teams in the league, so it wasn't necessary for him to play all that hard, in the NBA these days he probably would have even been rested during those games! As such, that leads to a lower statline against that team.
I did find this on Bryant 'Big Country' Reeves' Wikipedia page, so there might be some merit to the assertion on the back of this card:
ReplyDelete"In an episode of Open Court in 2014, Shaquille O'Neal named Bryant Reeves the toughest player to guard."
Well then...that just might be the case! Back in those pre-League Pass days, we almost never saw the Grizzlies here. They only played the Knicks and Nets twice a year and the rare times they got on national TV.
DeleteBusted so much of this product... baseball too... mainly for these metal cards. Great stuff.
ReplyDeleteIf you have any duplicates left, I would love to trade for them. I don't know why but I opened very little of this set, only about 3 packs worth when it was new.
Delete1998-99 was the dark ages as far as basketball collecting. A fellow Iverson collector brought this set to my attention. This is a large insert set with varying odds of pulling the cards. According to Beckett cards #131-150 are the toughest to pull at ratio of 1:60. Shaq, Kobe and Iverson are all in this group, however the Kobe is fairly common on the market, while the O'neal and the Iverson are very hard to come by. We all know that the lockout effected card sales and manufacturers have not issued series two of many sets and even scratched entire products. I still remember the full page ad for the 1998-99 UD3. There is a Michael Jordan prototype floating around however. Could it be possible that Molten Metal had a planned print run or box release that was cut short do the over production or no production at all? Some short prints could very well be super short prints then.
ReplyDeleteIt just hit me that the 1998-99 SkyBox Thunder Rave and Super Rave are thought to be more rare than the numbering on the back would indicate. The Super Rave is numbered to /25 however as far as I know it is a common fact in the hobby that there were less than that released. The same thing could have happened with some of the names in the Molten Metal set as well.
DeleteVery possible. The hobby never truly recovered from the first lockout. I have the UD3 promo you mention as well. It's one of my favorite Jordan cards simply due to the story behind it. I've never actually seen either Rave version from Thunder in person.
DeleteWhat a card !!
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