1999 Pacific Prism: Box Review (Hobby)

I'm back with yet another box break and box review thanks to my ongoing Breaker's Club.  Today, we are taking a look at the results of our 1999 Pacific Prism hobby box.  

Each hobby box contains 24 packs with 5 cards per pack.  The cards are all printed on holographic foil which makes for a very shiny pack openings!

One of the reasons that so many collectors love Pacific (including me) is that the company often had interesting ideas for parallels as well as inserts.  The '99 Prism set took a few cues from sets like Topps Tek in that there are a number of different base card parallels - though thankfully they are easier to recognize at a glance than Topps Tek might be (and certainly easier to recognize than the parallels that Pacific would put out in Prism set in the next year)!

Before we get to the inserts and parallels, let's look at a few of the base cards:

As you can see, it's a fairly simple (yet shiny) base design.  The backs of the cards are also well done - two photos plus a tiny bit of statistics for each player.

Our box produced 83 base cards plus an additional 26 base card duplicates.  Seeing as how the base set consists of 150 cards, getting 26 duplicates was definitely disappointing to me.  

\Moving on to the parallels.  Overall, the possible base parallels in 1999 Pacific Prism include:

• Red (print run of about 123 copies, Retail only)
• Holographic Gold (serial-numbered to 480)
• Holographic Purple (serial-numbered to 320, Hobby only)
• Holographic Mirror (serial-numbered to 160)
• Holographic Blue (serial-numbered to 80)

In total, there are 5 possible parallels for each base card - but our box could only produce four of the five types since the Red parallel was a retail only (and we ripped a hobby box).  Luckily, the Holographic Purple parallels were hobby only and we did quite well on those!  In total, we landed six of the Holographic Purple parallels:

Interestingly enough, each of our six Holographic Purple cards were serially-numbered 253/320.  

We also found a pair of the Holographic Gold parallels (this time with different serial numbering, the Williams is #409/480 and the Greer is #411/480).

Finally, we get to the inserts.  Our box contained three of the Diamond Glory cards (seeded 2:25 packs so we definitely beat the odds there)!  

From a group break perspective, it was nice to see a large number of teams hit something nice out of this box!  

Unfortunately, that was it for the inserts - we didn't find any of the rarer options (personally, I was hoping to pull an Ahead of the Game card because I wanted to see what those looked like in hand)!  

Overall, I give the 1999 Pacific Prism (hobby) box the following rating:

Set Design:  B

Collation:  F

Opening Thrill:  B-

Overall:  C-

While my overall rating for this box is kind of low, I do have to say that I personally like the 1999 Pacific set.  That being said, our box had a number of issues that forced my hand when it came to grading.  First, the sheer number of duplicate base cards (plus the fact that the insert collation was off) hurt the Collation category immensely.  I also had to knock the Opening Thrill score a bit because many of the cards had some black residue on them (presumably from being stuck to another card in the pack).  Finally, we didn't land any of the more difficult-to-find inserts so that took away from the box thrill a bit as well (and no Larkin parallels either)!