Paul Pierce Trifecta (and Then Some)

I probably shouldn’t start out by posting my two best Trifectas in Mike Piazza and Paul Pierce, but those are my best collections and the ones that bring me the most joy.

First up are various Pierce rookies. You’ve got Topps, Topps Chrome, Stadium Club, Stadium Club Chrome, Flair Showcase, Finest, Bowman’s Best and Ovation. None of these will really break the bank, but there are parallels of a lot of these which go for more money.

Like a lot of collectors, I went through a graded card phase mostly brought on by one or two purchases on eBay that I wasn’t thrilled with when they arrived. For what the SP Authentic was selling for at the time, I wasn’t buying it without knowing it was in good condition. The Finest and Chrome cards (along with an Ovation rookie not pictured) were just inexpensive purchases that I bought because they were graded.

While I do think that patches look cool, I don’t think that they’re necessarily as cool as their price tags make them out to be. Due to this, I don’t have too many patch cards in my collection. This card is one of them.

This is a strange card in that there’s a patch for Pierce, but nothing for Gary Payton. It makes the card look pretty lopsided. The Pierce patch is a great one though. It looks like the top of one of the Cs from the front of the jersey. I used to have an eBay search for “Pierce patch,” but as my collecting tastes have changed that search has been deleted.

I’ve got far too many Paul Pierce relic cards, so I decided to picture a couple of favorites and leave it at that. Pictured here are a couple of Murad jersey relics. The top is the black version which is numbered to 51 and the bottom is in unnumbered version.

Murad is my all-time favorite basketball set. The design is great, the framed relics and autos look amazing and it’s got minis. Who doesn’t love minis? The only thing that could have possibly improved this set would have been on-card autos. I can’t complain too much though.

Speaking of Murad, I guess you could also say that I’ve got the Murad hit trifecta. You’ve already seen the jersey cards and this here is the silk card which is limited to 25 copies. I love the nod to old time cloth cards even if these are encased and can’t really be touched. They’re still an interesting parallel.

I kind of spoiled the suspense on this card, but here’s the third part of the Murad trifecta and one of my favorite Pierce autographed cards. You know what’s great about this card? Even though it’s a sticker auto, Topps didn’t just take the base card and slap a sticker on it. I hate to harp on Panini, but their use of the same card over and over again in different versions really needs to stop.

On the top left you’ve got a Paul Pierce autographed patch card numbered to 50. The all green patch looks like it came from one of the 3s on a home jersey. I’ve inspected the edges and see no signs of someone swaping out a good swatch with this one and I’ve seen one other version of this card on eBay with a similar swatch.

Next up, Upper Deck Glass. I really, really love these thick acetate cards. I’ve got both the Paul Pierce and the Antoine Walker cards from the set. I love how the autograph really pops on this card

Other than the vertical autograph, I really like the next card. You’ve got a jersey and you’ve got an autograph. If it were from Pierce’s rookie season it would be a one-card-trifecta.

The last card is just a great design that displays the autograph perfectly. What do I love? Team colors. Look at how they shaded the background green. Beautiful.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows? Probably because someone knew that card companies would go crazy with multicolored parallels.

Turkey Red Basketball only lasted one year, but it was a good year. I loved the set and the hoops take on the classic design, but I must have been in the minority because the set didn’t return.

One thing that I think killed the interest in the set was that Topps didn’t end up serial numbering any of the colored parallels. These all come in differing rarities, but you’d never know which was the toughest to pull. Some serial numbering on the black and white parallels at the very least would have gone a long way.

It’s a double rainbow. What does this mean? It means that sometimes I’m not fully aware of what cards I already have when I’m snapping things up on eBay. Having extra refractors is never a bad thing especially when they look this good. I may put one of these trios into the nifty display case that I have on my wall so that everyone can bask in their glory.

This is a mixed rainbow. On the top you’ve got the Chrome versions of the cards and on the bottom you’ve got the regular versions.

This set looks as bad on basketball cards as it did on baseball cards. The little squares in the corners just don’t do it for me.

To cap it off, Here’s a 2005 Finest rainbow. I really need to make an effort to track down more of the Finest cards that I missed while I was away from the hobby. There are some cool designs that I missed out on which need to become part of my collection. One of these days I’ll get some sort of checklist together for my collections so that I have some sort of idea of what I really have.