Fleer - Key Trading Card Sets

Key Trading Card Sets

Fleer produced two benchmark trading cards in the 1980s. In 1984, Fleer was the only major trading card manufacturer to release a Roger Clemens card; they included the then-Boston Red Sox prospect in their 1984 Fleer Baseball Update Set. The 1984 update set also included the first licensed card of Hall Of Fame outfielder Kirby Puckett. Fleer also released factory sets of their baseball cards from 1986-92. Like the Topps factory sets, they came in colorful boxes for retail and plainer boxes for hobby dealers. The 1986 was not sealed, but the 1987-89 sets were sealed with a sticker and the 1990-92 sets were shrink-wrapped.

In 1986 Fleer helped resurrect the basketball card industry by releasing the 1986-87 Fleer Basketball set which included the Rookie Cards of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. This set is seen by many basketball card collectors as the "1952 Topps of basketball."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the glossy parallel sets Fleer produced for their 1987-89 baseball sets (similar to the Topps Tiffany sets) became very popular in the hobby. However, that popularity wore off, and today, the sets (except for the rare 1989) are not worth much more than the regular sets.

1991 saw the first release of Fleer's Ultra set, which in some years was actually been released earlier than its regular Fleer (Tradition) set. The 1991 set had an announced production of 15% of regular Fleer and this set was produced on higher quality card stock and used silver ink, just like Donruss' Leaf set starting the previous year. The 1992 set used UV coating on both sides and gold foil stamping on the front, which was among the most beautiful sets of that year. 1994's Ultra and regular Fleer sets began another tradition of offering an insert card in every pack and the next year started another tradition called "hot packs" (where about 1:72 packs contained only insert cards. An assortment of the easier to find insert cards and not the rare 1:36 100% foil cards). Still another tradition that continues today is the Ultra Gold Medallion parallel insert set, which started in 1995 and also included all the insert sets for the first two years. These are inserted one per pack. In 1997, Ultra introduced the Platinum Medallion insert set which is traditionally serial numbered to 100. The following year, 1998, saw the introduction of the purple Ultra Masterpieces, which are one of ones. 1998 also started the tradition of including short printed cards in the regular/Gold/Platinum sets.

Fleer's super premium flagship set, called Flair, began production in 1993 with an announced production run as 15% of Ultra. Its trademark was that it was printed on very thick card stock (about twice the thickness of regular cards), used a unique glossy finish along with six color printing. The "packs" are done by shrink wrapping the cards (usually ten in a "pack") and then placing them in a shrink-wrapped "mini-box" instead of the usual mylar foil packs used on virtually all trading card products today. The 1997 Flair Showcase set included the first one-of-one cards for any major sport called "Masterpieces"; they paralleled the more common, or "base", Row 2, Row 1 and Row 0 sets.