1998 Pacific Invincible: Box Review (Hobby)

Thanks to my ongoing Breaker's Club group break, I'm back with another box review to feature on the blog!  Today, we are looking at the results of a box break of 1998 Pacific Invincible.

To be upfront, it should be noted that I'm a big fan of late 90s Pacific.  I love the wacky, zany designs and mostly, I love the creativity and surprise that you can find in most of Pacific's products from that time period.  So, with rose colored glasses firmly on my face, let's dig in.

We'll begin with the base cards and I must say, these are spectacular.  

I love the acetate window with the player's face in it and top that off with a second action photo plus a large team logo (and despite the foil, easy-to-read player name) and you've got a winning combination.  The only downside is that these "base cards" come one-per-pack (which is surprising upfront since each of the 36 packs in the box contains five cards).

Our box yielded exactly 36 base cards which was precisely on point.  Furthermore, no duplicates which was good.  The downside here is that the base set contains 150 cards so only getting 36 base cards in a box makes this set quite difficult to collect in full!

Moving on, we get to the inserts beginning with the most common insert (typically four of these per pack) - the Gold Foil Gems of the Diamond Set.

For my money, it's the Gems of the Diamond cards that feel like the base cards and then the actual base cards feel more like a fancy insert.  Either way you want to label things, the Gems of the Diamond cards are actually quite beautiful in hand!  

Heck, even the backs of the cards are pretty neat looking:

My only regret here is that Barry Larkin isn't part of the Gems of the Diamond set for some reason.  I would have loved a Larkin card in this design for my collection!  As for the box, we ended up with 136 different cards out of the 220 card insert set plus a pair of duplicates (Dario Veras and George Williams).

That does it for the "common" stuff in the box, now on to the rarer inserts and parallels.  First, here's what the pack wrapper promises:

• Silver Invincible parallel:  2:37 packs
• Platinum Blue Invincible parallel:  1:73 packs
• Photoengravings:  1:37 packs
• Team Checklists:  2:37 packs
• Interleague Players:  1:73 packs
• Moments in Time:  1:145 packs

We'll begin with our pair of Silver Invincible parallels:

Yep, I was ecstatic to pull that Silver Larkin card as I needed that one for my personal collection!  

We also found one of the rare Platinum Blue parallels, this time going to the Pirates:

The Pirates also lucked into one of our two Team Checklist cards:

I like the look of the Team Checklist cards - there's one for the Reds which features Barry Larkin on it that I still need to try and find for myself!  

Finally, our other big hit of the box was this Tony Gwynn:

That's a 1:37 pack (i.e. box hit) Photoengravings card and I have to say, it's quite awesome.  The card has a canvas-like texture and feel to it, and coupled with the rounded corners, this card definitely stands out amongst all the glossy and shiny stuff that the rest of the box produced.  The Photoengravings set has 18 cards in it in total so good luck completing it since you aren't even quite guaranteed one Photoengravings card per hobby box!

Overall, I give the 1998 Pacific Invincible (hobby) box the following rating:

Set Design:  A+

Collation:  B+

Opening Thrill:  B-  

Overall:  B+

I love the set design here, both the base set plus the other inserts.  Collation was knocked down a couple of pegs due to the duplicate inserts and the "opening thrill" also took a hit given that most packs were the same thing - 1 base card plus 4 Gems of the Diamond (which kind of blended together after awhile).  Still, I enjoyed this box immensely and would happily rip into another one if I were given the chance...maybe next time I'll find that Larkin team checklist (or better yet, the Larkin Platinum Blue parallel)!