The thing that intrigues me so much about this blue box negative/stencil version is how the Marlboro lettering can appear or fade away with your focus. It is similar with the red negative version but more apparent here due to better contrast between the blue and green colors. The dark blue on this one is in your face immediately but then I need to focus on the sign for the lettering to become clear. I've always considered these cards works of art and this is just another example. It is just cool to me. The other interesting aspect of the card to me is that the centering and offset of the top diagonal bar ("overlap" using Hatorade's terminology) on the ones that I picked up were so close to the centering and diagonal bar overlap on the clear version cards. Maybe it is pure coincidence but as others pointed out, it suggests the blue box stencil may have come out of the same case as the clear one. Interestingly the centering and left side cut on the blue box card on eBay seems to be more similar to Hatorade's example than to the two I bought. It makes me wonder if the next clear one will turn up with this centering and rough left edge cut.
At this point I am only aware of 4 blue box negative/stencil cards (Hatorade's PSA 9, the two I purchased from the card shop owner who had the clear version, and this one) so absolute numbers so far are still quite low - albeit clustered on recent pickups. I'm not as worried about hoarders flooding the market since we have a lot of those here (me included to some extent) that have been trying to track down blue versions for some time with only limited luck. I actually want more blue ones in my collection! It would make sense that someone holding this card would have listed now given recent attention to the version in this thread. Increased attention and recent high sale prices may (hopefully) motivate more to come out of the woodwork. In any case, the current count for the blue box negative/stencil appears similar to the blue/aqua tint version. That said, this version is a little more subtle than the clear or blue/aqua tint cards.. so it is more likely these could be buried away unnoticed in pcs.
Last year so many early 1989 fleer wax cases seemed to come up for sale... I am curious how many of them were actually opened and what was pulled. With grading services halted many of the cards pulled from those cases may not be graded yet. If the clear and blue versions occured at the very start of production I would bet more graded examples could come to market over the next year.
I'm not convinced the blue box stencil version has the resale potential of the clear or blue/aqua tint cards but given there have been so few sightings over the last 10+ years I can't believe it is not rare and important. My semi uneducated guess puts this at the #3 in rarity after the clear and blue/aqua tint... but who knows.
Steve
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