Tek-ticular Fortitude

Taking a little break from packing to sort through some cards that came in the mail the other day and get everything ready to transported.  The great thing about all of the card blogs out there is that I’m constantly learning about new products that I never knew existed, especially from years that I didn’t collect outside of buying blasters here and there at K-Mart.  One of the sets that I was introduced to was Topps Tek.

I love oddball sets and this is definitely an oddball set.  Topps Tek took parallels to a whole new level.  Each player had multiple cards with different patterns in the background.  When Tek started off in 1998, there were 90 different designs of 90 players.  That’s a little much.  The backgrounds were just a bunch of random designs, but that would change with future designs.  1999 Tek had backgrounds that had something to do with the player and multiple pictures were used.  That continued with the 2000 Tek set.  2000 Tek had 20 variations for each player using four different pictures on five cards each.  The last five cards of each player were color variations that are numbered to 2000 and there are also gold parallels numbered to 10.

I recently came across a lot of 9 Piazza 2000 Tek cards on eBay and had to make them mine.  The auction closed at $5.50 and with shipping I ended up paying around eighty cents a card.  Not bad, but also not great for a Piazza base card.  It was worth it to pick up nine different variations at once though.  I also picked up some Piazza Tek cards from various years on CheckOutMyCards.com.  Here’s a sampling of the 2000 Tek cards that I have.  The team logo backgrounds are by far the best.  The stats, position and what hand they bat/throw with backgrounds are some of the worst.

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