Sep 29, 2026 · 22 min · 8 segments
1996 Topps Chrome Football is the inaugural set of the most important modern chrome brand, and the market still has not priced it correctly. In the first Slabnomics set deep dive, we go through the…
Everyone knows that the 80s and 90s were the junk wax era.
Manufacturers for sports cards were printing them out the wazoo because there was a newfound passion returning for sports cards.
As the printing presses increased their output year after year after year, by the early 90s, there was fatigue in the market.
Collectors were tired of seeing millions of copies of the same card, and the manufacturers knew that some kind of innovation was needed if they were going to keep their cash cow producing.
Before the mid-90s, the Chase cards ended up being error cards.
Whether it was just a birthday of the player that was wrong, no name printed of the player on the front, or some colorful language on the bottom of a bat, these error cards gave the hobby rarity to chase.
So in 1993, for baseball and for basketball, we got the first brand new, innovative, crazy new set called Top's Finest.
These Top's Finest had refractors that we now are very familiar with.
But when they came out in these early 90s, these refractors were the cat's pajamas.
Emboldened by the success of the selling of the packs and boxes for these, the manufacturers decided to push a new product in 1996.
A product that they were going to be able to sell much more than the $1.29 price point that PAX were selling at before.
And that's the set we're going to talk about today.
Now you have to understand that after all these years of printing, the manufacturers were concerned that they might not be able to sell this new product.
This concept was far from a shoo-in.
Remember that price point I was talking about? Trying to ask the market for 4x what they were used to paying is always going to be a pretty tough sell.
Although now we pay about 4x what hobby boxes were just a few years ago.
But I digress.
Anyways, so the point was they didn't think that this was a slam dunk success.
They were very wary.
And the makeup of the set is what is so interesting as well.
The chase cards for this set were simply silver refractors.
Everyone knows that the 80s and 90s were the junk wax era.
Manufacturers for sports cards were printing them out the wazoo because there was a newfound passion returning for sports cards.
As the printing presses increased their output year after year after year, by the early 90s, there was fatigue in the market.
Collectors were tired of seeing millions of copies of the same card, and the manufacturers knew that some kind of innovation was needed if they were going to keep their cash cow producing.
Before the mid-90s, the Chase cards ended up being error cards.
Whether it was just a birthday of the player that was wrong, no name printed of the player on the front, or some colorful language on the bottom of a bat, these error cards gave the hobby rarity to chase.
So in 1993, for baseball and for basketball, we got the first brand new, innovative, crazy new set called Top's Finest.
These Top's Finest had refractors that we now are very familiar with.
But when they came out in these early 90s, these refractors were the cat's pajamas.
Emboldened by the success of the selling of the packs and boxes for these, the manufacturers decided to push a new product in 1996.
A product that they were going to be able to sell much more than the $1.29 price point that PAX were selling at before.
And that's the set we're going to talk about today.
Now you have to understand that after all these years of printing, the manufacturers were concerned that they might not be able to sell this new product.
This concept was far from a shoo-in.
Remember that price point I was talking about? Trying to ask the market for 4x what they were used to paying is always going to be a pretty tough sell.
Although now we pay about 4x what hobby boxes were just a few years ago.
But I digress.
Anyways, so the point was they didn't think that this was a slam dunk success.
They were very wary.
And the makeup of the set is what is so interesting as well.
The chase cards for this set were simply silver refractors.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
