Have you ever had a card that looks ugly on the computer, yet when you see them in hand, they look incredible?  I’ve had it both ways, but nothing as eye popping as these:  The 1998 E-X Essential Credentials parallels.  Tidel144 posted online that baseballcardpedia.com had been updated, most notably (to me) the E-X set.  They are doing the Lord’s work over there, and I gotta give them props!

I have always been curious about a few things from the E-X cards, so here is essentially (credentially) a run down from their site.  The 101 card set was ordered by placing stars, semi-stars, minor-stars and finally future stars.  Each card has two parallels:  NOW and FUTURE.  The NOW parallel is serial numbered to the number of the card in the set, and the FUTURE is numbered to that number minus 101.  For example, Cal Ripken Jr. is card #9.  His NOW card is serial numbered to /9 and his FUTURE card is serial numbered to /92.

When I first got in the FUTURE Canseco parallel #/61, I was surprised by its beauty and was mesmerized by it, so I placed it at the top of my list to try to get it back into my collection.  I personally had NEVER seen either card for sale previously.  Because the only scans I saw online of the NOW /40 version, I didn’t have much of an urgency to add it.  Here is a scan of both together …. (FUTURE on the left and NOW on the right.)

Then I saw a Ripken NOW, and loved how it looked.  Plus, holy crap – look at the end price!

I was finally able to track down the NOW Canseco, and in doing so, was happy to finally be able to take proper pictures of them together:

And here is a video of them together:

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as big of a visual discrepancy between scan and picture as I have with these.