I don’t mean to complain, I really don’t. Card collecting is certainly a fine hobby, one that has provided me with hours and years of fun entertainment. It’s even allowed me to make numerous new acquaintances and friends along the way. And while I really don’t want to brabble about it, I’ve got admit some things about trading cards just bug me.
Take for example parallel cards. While they seem to be pretty popular, to me collecting and saving them becomes a waste of plastic nine-pocket pages. Why do I say that? Parallel cards, seeded in packs as low level chase cards, merely employ the same images and text as other cards in a set. Often mimicking base cards, parallels are tweaked just enough that they can be considered different. This can be done by surrounding card front images with a border or adding an enhanced finish, like foil. This technique has even been expanded to include higher chases like costume and autograph cards. At its foundation, though, the parallel is still essentially the same as the original non-parallel card.What’s worse is when a card set is stretched even further with multiple parallel versions of the same cards, like red bordered, green bordered, and the “ultrarare” gold bordered parallel subsets. Parallels are a boon for manufacturers as an easy way of expanding a set. Unless they are designed in a really imaginative way to me they remain as kind of a ripoff.