Back in the early '90s, the shiny high end parallel war scorched the earth. Every brand came out with a high end brand and every high end brand tried to out-shiny the other guy. It was an ever escalating battle that was eventually deemed moot by serial numbers and game used swatches. It also left a few brands in its wake. One of them was one I thought could have been a contender: Score. Score came out in 1988, a year before Upper Deck. It was colorful and had big bright pictures. It's entry in the high end sweepstakes was Pinnacle and Pinnacle looked great. It had solid designs and great backs. Then when everyone decided to go full bleed (one of the shots across the bow Stadium Club is responsible for), Pinnacle lost its way. It stayed simple, but just could not keep up with the SPs and Stadium Clubs of the world. Score was eventually bought out by Donruss and Donruss was eventually bought out by Pinnacle and by 1997, Score and Pinnacle were gone. Panini has brought back the Pinnacle name recently, but it just isn't the same.
The one thing Pinnacle can hang its hat on was what they called the dufex effect. It made things all shimmery and shiny and it looked wonderful. Pinnacle referred to these parallel cards as the Museum Collection. Sadly, I cannot explain why they decided that shiny was museum quality and not, say, painted-style pictures, but who am I to try to explain marketing from the 1990s? For football, they changed the name to the Trophy Collection, because, well, once again, who really knows...
I picked these cards up in recent years and never had the joy of pulling
a shiny dufex out of a pack. I have to think it was kinda mind-blowing
in 1994 to pull such a weird wild card. My, how times have changed.
So shiny, so 90s. RIP Kory Stringer - always hydrate when you workout.
I never noticed before, but the corner of that Craver card is clipped off. I also have a card from the wrong year on this page. I am a terrible curator of my dufex museum.
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