90's Box Breaks

One of my favorite insert sets to chase in the mid-90′s was anything that dealt with refractors. Sure, I love dufex more, but refractors weren’t as common as they are today and so the appeal to them was much greater.

In 1996, Topps created an insert set based on Mickey Mantle. Sound familiar? Well, unlike this decade, there wasn’t an over-abundance of Mantle cards on the market and these cards saw decent premiums if you were lucky to pull one and sell it.

Called “Mantle Finest”, this 19-card insert set was a parallel of the Finest set, which in turn was a parallel of the base set. That is, there was a base set, chrome set (Finest), and then the Refractor set. Whew.

What makes these refractors stand out? Glad you asked.

Randomly inserted at the rate of one in 144 Series two packs and one in 96 series two hobby packs, this 19-card set is parallel to the regular set and is similar in design. It is distinguised from the regular set by the refractive quality of the cards. Just like all the other 96 Mantles, cards 15-19 are printed in 20 percent less quantity than cards 1 through 14.

Could you imagine what might have been, had this technology existed almost 60 years ago?

1996 Finest Mantle Refractor #1 - 1951 Bowman