Thought these were kind of neat. e98s, in my opinion, always seemed to be a pretty "clean" set and not one that produced a lot of printing goofs (like e90-3 for instance). Previously, the only e98 variations I was really aware of were the Old Put overprints, which are almost never found and if so, only on a couple players.
There were quite a few of these black and white cards on Ebay a few weeks back and I'm surprised no one mentioned them here. I picked up six of the cards I saw up for auction. Most of these are completely void of any color at all. One or two look like they might have a slight pinkish hue to the card though.
A couple things I noticed with these....
The cards, despite being lowgrade, are NOT faded at all. The photos are still sharp and compare to the e97 black and whites in terms of quality. This makes me believe that the cards weren't simply left out in the sun for too long. If you notice the finer details such as the color of the players' skin and gloves, you'll see that on the normal cards, there are flesh toned colors for the skin and brown used for the gloves. But on B&Ws, everything is just a slate grey color. I think the McLean is a really solid example of this. A card that has faded wouldn't simply turn grey, rather everything would appear really washed out and lighter, yet still have some color. Also, check out the captions at the bottom. The caption on the black and whites are just as sharp as the ones on the colored cards, another reason I don't believe the colors simply just faded away.
Seeing as how several of these also have been placed in numerical holders, I don't believe there was any chemical-altering or any other funny business going on. It really seems as though the cards missed most of, if not all their color passes.
Backs on these are normal...they aren't blank backs or anything like that. The print is just like those on the normal cards.
Any thoughts? Have any of you seen e98s like these before? I seem to remember a Cobb or perhaps a Matty coming up for auction a while back that was of the black and white variety. That might have been an e93 though...
e98-001.jpg
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