I have now just bought my 3rd set of nine of the 1994 X-Men Hunters/Stalkers insert set.

Jeff Allender lists them as Rainbow, Gold & Silver but I am struggling to identify them apart.

I have one set that looks largely like gold background, another that was sold to me as 'Rainbow' but has mostly blue backgrounds and another 9 cards that could be from any of the three. In all cases though, card #1 (Apocalypse) looks indistinguishable from one another.

Does anyone have any tips or knowledge as to how to separate them out?

It's not card specific but what I do to easily distinguish hard to identify color/tint variants is to look at the card in morning sunlight while holding the card tilted like reading a book. Just don't let the sunlight reflect directly on the card because it'll be hard to see and distinguish colors.

Apocalypse 'blue' has a gold background around his name. The silver has a silver background around the name. The rainbow looks almost like the blue card, but if you move your head side to side while looking at it, you can see a slight prism effect below the block his name is in. I also had a VERY hard time distinguishing these cards when completing this set. Some of them are easy to sort, some not so easy.

Thanks for that Cardaddict it's all very helpful stuff. I think that one of my problems is that I don't have a "known" silver card from this set to be able to make comparisons with. Short of actually pack-pulling these cards (so that you know the source)makes the whole thing very subjective.

Sometimes I've had difficulty telling one variant from another even if I had samples of each one right in front of me.

quote:

Originally posted by allender:
Sometimes I've had difficulty telling one variant from another even if I had samples of each one right in front of me.

Oh well, that's handy I sez to me mate, if the guru of card collecting can't tell the difference what chance have us mere mortals got??