1991 Donruss Baseball Forum

OK, anybody who is still up and knows about this stuff...

I just got to 1991 Donruss in my Donruss box.  I did about 8 cards and it took about 15 minutes.  Is there any dead giveaway to know if I have the C version, or do I need to actually look at each scan in the database?  In otherwords, do all C borders have a certain characteristic that is never present in the A/B versions?  I'm about ten minutes away from throwing all of my 1991 Donruss in the trash.  Maybe one of you can stop this capital offense.

Question 2...

Since the A and B version have a different color back, in addition to the INC vs INC. , does anyone know if the C version has the same color back as A or as B, or do both exist?

I just went though my PC.  Yes, A and B have different backs shading. Most are easy to see the difference though some B backs do come close to the A back.  I believe the Factory set back is more like the B than the A but I will compare a couple of cards to confirm.

No there is no easy way to see the difference between A/B and the C border.  If you have a lot of each card and they are organized / sorted, you can simply go through each card pile and the odd one that is different will be the Factory set card. I have probably about 20-30 of each card # so the first thing I would do is fan them.  Exposing all the left borders, I quickly was able to pick out any factory set card. 

If you have to compare them to the cards in the database, it will take quite a bit of time for the whole set. 

Thanks Bruno.  I don't have that many, other than Vince Coleman, who I have about 100 copies of for some reason I can't quite remember.  The A vs B color thing is a LOT easier to tell in series 2 than series 1.  Extremely obvious in Series 2.  I did just have the idea though of using the set's gallery, with the new 9-per-page feature, which will show me all three versions at once, large enough to actually see.  That may get me through these, and 1988 also.

Can't we just make versions B and C parallels? Even if thats not correct, at least it is a lot more efficient.

Oh, no, that would have been a lot harder if I couldn't have seen them on the same screen to compare.

The reason they were not made parallels was that there are about 8-10 cards that have the same border, be it from packs or from the factory set.  I compared a true and pure FS to the cards that were uploaded and determined those that did not change in border. As well, there are 2 versions of the FS; they are not the same, one being just like the pack cards, the other almost all different. Not my decision; it was brought up to Admin and this is the way they decided. As for the Grand Slammers insert set, there are 5-6 different borders for each card (the most I have of any one card is 5 but Dan suspects six, not sure if this was from personal hoard or a guess).

As for the 1988 set, most cards' differences are in the short bio on the back (different font therefore the last line of the text starts differently). For those that don't, and this includes all of the Diamond Kings, I have no idea what the difference is. Yes the odd ones have the border coloring reversed but very few from what I could tell. 

This all makes the 1987 Donruss so simple to figure out.

Jd-sports - as you can see, David there would have not liked us putting the sets as parallels. Because neither B or C version contained a full run of the set, Admin instructed that we were to make them VARs, even if that made a master set of about 2050 cards. Remember, there are MANY collectors out there who wish to create a base set, and they don't care which versions are actually in the set (that would be how my set looks, albeit simply [a]s and [b]s). There are some who would mix in [c]s and be fine with that. Then there are those who want to have 1 of every variation possible - either for a player, a team, or the entire set.

The only way to create a checklist that suits all the various collector types is the way it was done. Yes, it's cumbersome, and heck yes it's tedious to figure out every card in a collection (especially since many collectors have 1,000s of these). Admin was very careful about how we went about adding these. It was a lot of work (thankfully Bruno and a couple others were a huge help), but I think we got it right.

Ok, that's fine. It's just annoying with the huge set...

JD

I agree, but that's Donruss's fault, not TCDB's!!  This whole thing is super-annoying to me too, but thank you to everyone who worked real hard to get each VAR on the checklist, however it was done in the end.  I know a lot of effort went into it.