1991 Fleer: Junkiest of the Wax

About a month ago I pulled my collection out of the attic and spread it out on my office room floor.  Since then I've slowly been picking away at each stack, pulling out my favorite players and placing them in sleeves and top-loaders.  Then I sort the remainder of the commons into other stacks by brand, then year, then in order by card number.  It's been an extremely tedious, but also very rewarding and relaxing experience.  I throw on some tunes or an audiobook and sort my stacks in peace.  Some stacks are more fun than others.

One of the best was 1990 Leaf.  I'll dedicate an entire post to that one.  This isn't that post.  This post is about the stack I had been avoiding and delaying, until last night.  The junkiest of my beloved junk wax collection.  A set so junky that even I, a self-proclaimed Junk Wax Junkie, was not looking forward to going through.

Bo Knows 87 Topps

Here's the thing about junk wax - though not high on the value scale, the sets often hold a lot of other positive attributes.  They can have charm, often though creative design.  That charm can also happen through feelings of nostalgia.  I have strong resonating memories for the 1987 Topps design.  It's different - kind of weird, actually - and maybe off-putting for some collector's.  I love it though.  1989 Donruss is another very 80s/early 90s looking design that holds a lot of charm.  It's one of my all-time faves.  By the time junk wax reached it's full velocity in production though, I feel like some of the companies stopped caring about the design a bit.  Or a lot.  Or maybe they did care, but just lost the ability to balance innovative design and maintain low costs.  1989 Upper Deck (and then the aforementioned 1990 Leaf) changed the game when it came to quality of the photography, design, and card stock.  Maybe some of the other companies just had a hard time keeping up and went for something different when it came to design.

Can The Wizard save this
design?

1990 Donruss started the downward trend, after several consecutive years of strong design (85-89 were all really good years for Donruss).  The red cards and cursive font just didn't really work.  They followed that with one of the worst designs ever with the 1991 Donruss set.  The Blue cards were bad, the green ones even worse.  Fleer had a tough go too - the 1990 Fleer set design was weak, 1992-94 Fleer I don't even remember without looking up.  They came out with the Fleer Ultra line, which improved things quite a bit (trying to compete with Topps Stadium Club), but I don't know if those improvements were enough to offset what you are about to see.  None of those compare to this monstrosity:  1991 Fleer.  Holy crap.

Arya Stark looked too
closely.

Can you still see after beholding the might of that card?  Some of these cards actually have nice photos.  Too bad you'll never notice them through all of that yellow.  This is the set I've been avoiding from the beginning, partially because I just don't like the design (obviously), and partially because I have about 37 thousand of them.  I started sorting them last night, and maybe for the first time since I cracked open the boxes storing my collection, I would have rather been doing something else.  On previous nights I stayed up way too late just to finish sorting a set, or logging it into my ridiculously large spreadsheet database.  Last night I finished about half of it and then retired to watch some Netflix.

He HAD to know

The market agrees with my disdain for this set (and the 91 Donruss).  The entire 720-card set books for a whopping $8, with the highest card in the set valued at $1.25 (Griffey & a Griffey/Bonds combo card).  Values don't mean so much to me, but they can go a long way in making up for a design I don't really care for.  Here they only exacerbate the problem.  I have a ton of them, they aren't worth anything, and I don't really like the design.  Sometimes one card in a set can also change the viewpoint for an entire set.  Take 1989 Fleer, where the craze over finding a rare "Fuck Face" variant of the Billy Ripken card stole everyone's imagination for a few months (and it's still a highly-coveted card).  I actually really like the design of 89 Fleer, and the Griffey rookie card helps too, but I think Billy Ripken went a long way in endearing that set in many of our hearts.

So, what's next?  Do I throw them out?  Do I give them away or sell them at a flea market or garage sale?  Short answer:  NO WAY!  They are part of my collection, and I love my collection.  We all have family members we don't like as much as others - do we kick them out of the family?  No, we love them too, because they are family.  1991 Fleer is my drunk uncle, and I love him unconditionally.