Trading Cards: Marvel Masterpieces '96

I wasn't going to include images of this card set, but people kept hinting, so here they are.

The set was produced in 1996 by Skybox who at that time held the trading card rights to the Marvel characters. They had just been taken over by Fleer who, in turn, had just been taken over by Marvel! (presumably to regain control of this aspect of their characters.) This was the fifth series of cards in the Marvel Masterpieces range which for some reason was not as widely distributed as expected - in fact it is the rarest set of the series to the extent that individual, common, cards sell for as much as you would expect to pay for a complete base set in other series. The chase cards are proportionally even more expensive.

This set is split into a number of subsets (the first three of which comprise the basic set) as follows:

• Characters: 54 cards (1 - 54)
• Duels & Legacies: 45 cards (55-84.) Some of the artwork is in landscape format with the image being split across two consecutively numbered cards - in such cases I have shown the complete image rather than the two halves.
• Genesis: 15 cards (85 - 99.)
• Card 100 is a checklist which does not appear in the table below because it contains no image.
• Gallery: 6 cards. The gallery consists of 6 portraits each surrounded by a (printed) gold frame as if it were a painting in a portrait gallery.
• Double Impact: 6 double sided cards with a Boris artwork on one side and a Julie artwork on the other. I have shown these as two groups of 6 cards - the duplicate numbers show the alternate sides of each card.
• Artwork Redemption: 9 cards which were redeemable for the original artwork depicted thereon - for obvious reasons only one of each card was produced. Although the featured characters are known the actual artwork and artist was not revealed. The identities of three redeemed cards are known to me and two of the others can be surmised because the characters only feature on one painting each but two or more candidates exist for the others so your guess is as good as mine as to which paintings they were. No information has been released concerning a fourth card (found relatively recently) as the owner is attempting to redeem it – a difficult task due to multiple reorganisations, take-overs and closures of the companies involved. There is no news of the other cards – I suspect they were probably not issued due to the set's limited distribution.
• Promotional: 6 cards - the images are the same as those on the Gallery cards.
• Master Prints: 2 oversized, case insert, cards
• Uncut Sheets: 3 of these were produced.

Unfortunately I have had to use scans of the actual cards in some cases because suitable images of the paintings are not available.

The table below lists the card number, character portrayed and, if necessary, '(J)' to indicate that the artist was Julie Bell. The astute reader will note that the arrangement is alphabetic order by character within an assortment of subsets, which is why there is no pattern to the order of the artists. For anyone who cares about the statistics, there are 108 different paintings in the set shared equally (ie 54 each) between Boris and Julie.