Guys, I apologize - I'm waaay late on contributing to this thread. I completed my Master Set run of the common cards and the entire group went away to the vault. It just took a while for me to remember to grab them so I could participate in this thread
On the whole e98s are in my top 3-4 favorite sets of all time. The challenges I faced when putting this group together rank up there with any collecting project I've ever undertaken. There's such a wide variety of difficulty with collecting all variations like this. Some player/color combos seemingly pop up all over. Others seem to take years to find. This particular project likely would have to rank up there as my very favorite set-collecting endeavor that I've undertaken yet. In fact, I'd say it's inspired a couple of my current projects as I also am after a commons set-run for both the t204 and the e107 set (haha, yeah right!)
Some of my thoughts based on questions asked in this thread -
Toughest background color -- I think the toughest color I've stumbled across was green. When I was starting to inch my way towards "shouting distance" of completing my set of commons, I looked at which cards I still needed and it seemed that I was short all the toughies in green. My favorite color would be orange. That's the most vibrant color in my opinion and maybe the color I had the best of luck finding examples of...lol.
Toughest cards -- I'm one of those that believes that the HOFers in this set are pretty easy to come by when compared to the commons. With the exception of a few tough player/color combinations of course. But interestingly enough, with this set, the HOFers actually outnumber the commons and it's the commons that generally don't turn up to often. The commons themselves have a wide variety of difficulty to them in finding specific ones. Specific color combinations then, get especially grueling. The toughest commons for me were Tenney (who gives me fits in most sets I collect), Coombs and Vaughn.
McLean in blue and orange -- My blue is a PSA 2 and my orange is an SGC 20. I don't really remember any difficulty with either card, but I do recall orange being kind of tricky for me at the very end of the project. For some reason the final 3 cards I needed were all orange and they were all cards that SHOULD have been amongst the easiest player/color combos to find. Cards like the orange Ford and orange Meyers were making themselves difficult to find for some odd reason. No idea why, but I think the orange Mclean was in that group too.
Misprints/Oddities -- Ahh my favorite part of collecting e98s! You run into a lot of Caramel issues that just flat seem to have no misprints/printing goofs show up EVER! Sets like e95/e96, e102, e103, etc... just never seem to have anything unique show up. e98s are a little different. While the set isn't riddled with errors or anything like that, I have noticed a few goofs --
- oversized handcut cards - Only seen very very few of these and they're my favorite e98 "oddity". I have an oversized orange Coombs and Ford in my collection
- blank backed examples such as Steve Falleti's Bresnahan and a Tinker in my collection
- “old put” overprint on back - several red and blue cards
- several e98s with miscut backs (left to right).
- Orange Walsh with red "ghost" layer that Leon posted earlier. I believe that finding an e98 that is "off" in terms of it's registration is insanely rare. Leon's example involves a printing pass that just happened to be off by a tiny bit.
- “almost B&W" cards - these may have been soaked though. I have a couple though that are void of any color altogether.
I'll get a few scans up in a little bit....