Trading Cards: Marvel Masterpieces '96

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

This much sought-after 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 but it only had a limited production of 30,000 boxes compared to 350,000 for some of the earlier sets. They were sold in packets of seven cards, there being 18 packs per box, making a total of 540,000 packs. Their rarity means that individual cards cost more than complete packs of other Boris sets with certain popular cards costing several hundreds of $$$.

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.) The Duel cards consisted of pairs of consecutively numbered cards that displayed the left and right sides of the same painting. Every third card was a Legacy card. This arrangement allowed the cards to be displayed, on the standard 3 x 3 pages, in numerical order without the Duel pairs having to be split between two rows. In my images I show the complete paintings rather than the two separate halves that appeared on the cards.
• 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, 1:3 packs. The gallery consists of 6 portraits each surrounded by a (printed) gold frame as if it were a painting in a portrait gallery. Promotional cards were the same as these but were distinguished from them by having a corner of the card clipped.
• Double Impact: 6 cards, 1:4 packs These were double-sided, embossed, cards with a Boris artwork on one side and a Julie artwork on the other. The two sides had to be produced separately, before being bonded together as a single item, making them the thickest cards in the set. They are shown below as two groups of 6 cards - the duplicate numbers show the alternate sides of each card.
• Artwork Redemption: 9 cards, 1:60,000 packs. The cards were redeemable for the original artwork depicted thereon so 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 three of the others can be surmised because there is only one available candidate (because one of the two Wolverine paintings had previously been given as a prize in a promotional competition.) No information has been released concerning a fourth card (found relatively recently) as the owner is attempting to redeem it – my understanding is that there was a time limit on redemption which expired some time ago. There is no news of the other cards – I read somewhere that over a third of the boxes remain unopened (they were rather more expensive that previous sets so were not popular at the time of issue) which means that there are potentially three or four cards yet to be discovered. These cards are the reason for the limited production run: 9 x 60,000 = 540,000 packs which, at 18 packs/box, gives 30,000 boxes.
• 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, useable images are not available for all of the paintings so in some cases I have had to resort to using scans of the actual cards.

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.