Monday, April 14, 2008

2005 Donruss Diamond Kings

If Donruss were still around I probably wouldn't be so bored with the wax that was out now. Topps and Heritage are yielding maybe one or two cards a pack I need, Upper Deck is nice but not exciting, Moments & Milestones and Spectrum are too dang expensive and Opening Day and First Edition are terribly inferior copies of the base sets. I saw this pack of Diamond Kings cheap and grabbed it, eager for some artsy cards from the exiled manufacturer. George smiles at me as if to tell me everything's going to be all right.

241 Alexis Rios
103 Lance Berkman
73 Ryan Wagner
292 Darryl Strawberry Dual Jersey #12/50
7 Chone Figgins
295 Rickey Henderson

George was right! I wasn't expecting a Jersey out of this pack, but with the number of framed and non framed and different colored foil in this set any given jersey can't be too tough. The odds on the back are as confusing as all the parallel sets. Strawman has two away swatches on a card with silvery holofoil. I'm not sure what parallel that makes this. It's numbered to 50 so it has to be really rare and expensive right? Right? The Rickey card beats any old card with rags stuffed in it anyway. The paintings are cool and are really well done. The artists are: Chuck Gillies (Figgins), Mark Turnes (Wagner and Strawberry), Ron Adair (Berkman), Ben Teeter (Rios) and Ivan Punchatz (Rickey). Did you know Ivan did the cover art for Doom? You do now... I guess Topps' frequent use of Dick Perez and the UD Masterpieces set has filled the void of Diamond Kings but I still think the the hobby is worse off without 'ol DK.

1 comment:

capewood said...

I really liked the 2004 Diamond Kings set. I thought the cards were very attractive. And though expensive, I bought a hobby box on eBay. The 2004 set had a base set of 175 cards with 79 (that's right, 79) parallel insert sets. The parallels had everything you could think of. Different foil, frames (and different color frames), jersey pieces, autographs, bats, serial numbers, and just about any combination of the above you could imagine. 13,825 cards.

The 2005 set wasn't as attractive. And it took the idea of 2004 to extremes. 450 cards in the base set but only (?!) 69 parallels. 31,050 cards!

So for either of these sets it wasn't hard to pull a parallel, but if you're a set collector forget it.