Hey,

So I'm new to this community, really I haven't been super in to collecting non-sports cards since I was a wee lad. These days I mostly focus on coding python and work stuff.

Any-who I'm at my parents place due to some health issues as of late, and have been going through my old things. I have a collection of Marvel Masterpieces cards from their first run in 1992 ... the "SkyBox" ones. I guess way back when I managed to put together a whole set with the help of my mom.

Though now with the internet being what it is I was looking online to verify my collection ... and it seems like I have a rather incredible misprint on one of my cards.

The Wolverine VS. Sabertooth Foil card that I have seems like it has been double/triple/quadruple gold flaked. I remember thinking I got some sort of special card when I found it in a pack as a kid, so I put it into one of those plastic cases and bided my time until I was old enough to buy a house so that I could place it on my mantel.

Now that I'm looking at it though, and scouring the internet for a similar looking card ... I'm thinking maybe I have a rather rare misprint/error ... rather than some sort of special gold foil card.



I found a high resolution image of the normal card ...



On mine even if you use a magnifying glass you can't make out any background details. Really the only thing that seems like it's not gold/foil flake are the muscles on either character.

Is this a defect, and worthless?

Is it a special card? Perhaps, if I present it to Stan Lee, he will bring me to a super duper top secret CIA lair where they will use advanced alien technology to make me a super human? My eyes will shoot laser beams at bad guys and the power of old spice at beautiful girls ... it will be glorious. GLORIOUS!

Sorry about that ... now back to our regularly scheduled thread.

I imagine misprints like this have some value like with sports trading cards? I just wonder if there's enough interest ... I will say my 10 year old self was blown away by the awesome-ness of this misprint. It's not like "Brett Favre" was mis-spelled ... Though sports fans seem to be going nuts on eBay for cards with these sorts of mistakes.

The card is shimmering gold!

Generally, misprints are of limited interest, but the original Marvel Masterpieces sets are beloved and widely collected to this day, so there are always people looking for something, anything, different to add to their collections, and these fit the bill. It's a cool "off-register" version of one of the best cards in the set, so I think there would be some interest in this.

I've got a few misprints from the various Marvel sets over the years, and not really collecting those kinds of things, I've pretty much sold all of them, and would usually get $10 each or more. Probably the best one I had was a 1995 Marvel Masterpieces "wrong back", a very unusual error from a really popular set, so that one sold for a little more. I'd value yours at somewhere around $20, but there's really only one way to find out...

Yeah I can't imagine the misprint in this case would really detract from the card. It really remains a very stunning little piece of pop-art.

The 10-year old version of me collecting these I had no idea about misprints ... and the foil ones were always the most exciting aspect of getting new cards. When I got this one I thought I found some extra super special foil edition.

Though now I realize it's just a misprint I imagine there's a bit of a niche market for these at this point. I'd like to grab collector's attention before I just throw it on e-bay ... given it's a kind of unique item. Though I also don't want to just spam every comic message board on the net like a jack-*** ... given it's not the first sketch of superman or some such.

Any-who ... thanks for the reply and info!

I guess I won't miss an opportunity for a brief yet shameless plug. If anyone is interested feel free to get in touch with me via my profile information as rather than putting this back in storage I'm going to throw it on the net pretty shortly

I did enjoy collecting these greatly when I was younger, hopefully I can revisit all this if I ever spawn some offspring ... though these days I just don't have time.

I got motivated to start selling stuff off when I saw what state some of the packaging for a few of my collectables were in ... basically the packaging had completely rotted away ... from the elements. I started to realize a) I didn't have time to appreciate it anymore and b) didn't even have the proper environment to store anything long-term ... so off it all goes

I've seen a bit of a recent flurry of activity for "variants" of Fleer cards from this time period, especially for chase cards. For many years people have tracked "color variations" for holofoils and similar cards that were relatively complicated to produce, like this spectra card.

It appears that at different times of production, the mix of inks may have changed or one of the ink colors may have been omitted. I've seen a few cards where there seem to be approximately equal splits for different color gradings (if you can trust colors on internet images).

I agree that some of the "variants" like yours, even if they were mistakes in theory, are gorgeous. Yours might have been one that missed an entire layer - the whole black/red background wasn't printed, and you can't say that your version is lacking in red tones.

It's striking enough that it looks like it was intended. Maybe it was a printer's proof card for a parallel "gold" version of the spectra foils. If so, maybe Fleer made a mistake by choosing the other design for the balance of the set.

You might find it slightly easier to get close to Joe Jusko to bring you to the CIA lair than Stan. Crowds are slightly smaller.

I finally found the rest of my collection (the duplicates) ... and actually have a non-misprint so can do a proper side-by-side if anyone is interested.

I'd do it now, but it'd require me to pull the cards from their respective plastic cases ... and I'm being lazy.

I actually have a card like this, but its the hulk vs thing and theres no border and no writing, "hulk vs thing."

Ill post a picture later this morning.