1996 Pinnacle hand collated set purchase

I was wandering around at a card show [that have made up my last couple of posts], trying to peek into the table with the dollar card monster boxes - it was in the same place at the gym, but a little congested for me to squeeze into.

A mother and her boys were planted at the table, another guy was browsing around and a couple of guys were chatting next to the table, just about bumping into me - the table wasn’t that busy the last time around, but maybe I was resigned to look somewhere else in the meantime as I lingered idly.

At a neighboring table, I saw a storage bin with smaller, presumably completed insert sets from the mid 1990s and 100-card hand collated base sets from the early 2000s - I was hoping for a little odder stuff like junk wax era minor league team sets, assorted junky wax packs or even retail boxed sets from the 1980s.

Maybe I should have looked closer at the rest of the cards in the bin, but it wasn’t that smorgasbord of misfit toys - I spotted a larger cardboard box labeled 1996 Pinnacle, so presumably it was a hand collated set.

Was there anything good in this set me to consider for $20 [?] - that maybe a steep price where who knows what could be inside after all these years.

Regardless, I started pawing at the box like this could be buried treasure found - certainly this was year with the cult favorite Bob Hamelin card [#289] and maybe the rest of the cards are just gravy, if the Hamelin was still there.

I could have opened the box to check what exactly what was in there and seller gestured to go ahead, but the UV coated cards were still stuck together in bricks - thinking this could have been an outright disaster otherwise, I'll take a gamble on finding the one cards that may be irrelevant relevant and salvaging the rest.

I took the cards outside to look at them and was able to ply some of the cards loose with some delicate but deliberate twisting - the set was in numerical order and indeed, the Hamelin card was there, a cleaner copy of the card I got in 2020.

Breaking the set down through the past week, the rest of the cards were fairly clean all around - I think the cards not being sealed up in packs helped with the natural conditions just a bit, though there was still some unavoidable bricking issues on some random cards plied apart from each other.

Later on I checked the newspaper used as stuffing for a dateline, to give me a clue when the set may have been put together - finally found an ad with date going back to 1996, so that’s a long time.

Maybe a thing about picking up a complete set of cards is finding stragglers that would have never come to my attention otherwise - where I do scrutinize the backs of cards when possible.