A new obsession

A couple of weeks ago, I did a trade with Shane from Shoebox Legends (the best sports card blog on the Internet, far as I can tell). I sent him some cards from 2013-14 Prizm and he sent me a random lot, including some from my Zistle wantlist and quite a few other surprises.

But one card in particular really caught my attention.

On the surface, it's not much of a card. Just a relatively easy-to-find parallel of a boring common in one of the cheapest hockey sets on the market. But really *look* at it. It is absolutely beautiful. I can't quite articulate it, but I think Panini has amped up the colors or altered the picture somehow to make it almost look more like a comic-book illustration than a photograph. The colors are super vivid, and the gold border really makes everything pop (especially compared to the white borders on the base cards). It's worlds ahead of anything I would have expected out of a Score set.

Since receiving this card, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I've spent quite a bit of time browsing the rest of the set online, and most of the other cards also appear to have that digital illustration effect. And it looks like the set includes a whole bunch of great photos, too, just as good as anything in Upper Deck.

Here are just three more, pulled  from the Zistle library:

I like these cards so much that I think I'm going to take a run at hand-collating the gold parallels. This is a monster set -- 550 base cards, plus another 100 short-printed rookies and other subsets -- so it's unlikely I'll ever get there. But the cards are widely available and even the gold parallels are relatively cheap, so it shouldn't be impossible, either. I've already tried to work out a Zistle trade with someone who has a bunch of these available.

If nothing else, it'll be a(nother) fun chase.