1998 Finest Mystery Finest Baseball Cards

1998 Finest Mystery Finest is a beautiful set but admittedly kind of a headache. With peels, base, refractors, and errors, there’s a lot going on here. It’s a 2-series run with 90 cards between the two and each comes in a refractor parallel. Cards come with black peels that cover both card faces that require the peels to be detached to see which players are depicted on the cards, hence the set title. Each series is made up of two-sided cards with each player sharing card real estate with themselves and 3 different players for a total of four unique cards for any one player in the set. It’s already a lot of work between the two series’ but that’s not all. Determined collectors will enjoy pursuing the error examples from series 1 (to my knowledge, this issue only exists in series 1).

In series 1, Topps accidentally printed a run of each the base and refractors with and without the R for refractor statement on card numbers, which means collectors have to chase 16 unique cards across the correct and error versions between the base and refractors, and that’s just for series 1. To give you an idea of what you’re up against, between the two series,’ Frank Thomas has 22 unique cards. For those chasing the unpeeled examples, that number could be much higher but 22 is the stock number for unique versions regardless of the peel being intact or not.

The following image showcases an example of the errors from series 1, which includes the base with the R (2nd image), and the refractor without the R (4th image). Due to the subtle nature of this error, it often goes unnoticed and from my observation, the errors don’t demand quite the same premium as the corrected versions but for the most part, prices appear to be very similar between the two.

To see what’s currently on eBay from 1998 Finest Mystery Finest, click here.

Set Information:

Mystery Finest 1 Checklist:

Mystery Finest 2 Checklist:

To see what’s currently on eBay from 1998 Finest Mystery Finest, click here.