Cards I Love Part 11 - 1998 Skybox EX 2001 Essential Credentials Ray Lankford

There are writers who have those blogs that are only about one set.  I do not think I could do that.  It's hard enough for me to stick to a consistent theme, like Cards That I Love, for month let alone do it for a longer period of time.  The Night Owl 1985 Topps Blog is a masterpiece.  If you have not read it, you are missing out.  Went all out and even did the Traded set too.

If there were ever going to be a set that I could turn into its own blog, it would probably be some modern small set like the 1998 Skybox EX 2001 set.  That was one of my favorite sets from the late 1990s.  Twenty some years later, it is still one of my favorite sets from that era.

Not the Ray Lankford card mentioned in the title, but this is the base card.  Half acetate, half foil.  It is the quintessential modern baseball card.  If you do not own any of these cards, I suggest you find a few for your collection.

Now for Ray.

I did not do parallel sets in the late 1990s.  If I pulled one from a pack that was fine, otherwise I was not going to go chase down a bunch of serial numbered cards with different colored foil or the whatnot.  However, I really liked the 1998 Skybox EX set, and I decided to venture out on a limb with this set by finding a few Essential Credentials cards.

There are not many Cardinals in the set, and a hard to find McGwire parallel in the late 1990s has outrageous written all over it.  So, instead I went after the Ray Lankford cards.  There are two parallel sets in the 1998 Skybox EX set.  There is a Essential Credentials Now and Essential Credentials Future.  There is some formula to how they are serial numbered, but that's a long story.  I like to think of them as a pinkish serial numbered set, and a gold colored parallel set.

I ended up with the Essential Credentials Future card, which is the pink parallel, as my big find from this product. 

I have the Essential Credentials Now card too, but I am sticking with the Futures card for this post.  

This is a card that I love for several reasons.  

First, it is just a great looking card.  Who collected in the late 1990s, and wouldn't want to own a card like this of their favorite player?  I ended up with several of these cards that are not Lankfords, and I love those too.  Maybe not as much.  I also own the 1999 Skybox EX Lankfords, which look a little different.  

Second, I had always collected Ray Lankford cards, but this card tilted me into doing more with finding some of his good cards.  It is tough to collect cards of some of the late 1990s players, their parallels are expensive and hard to track down.  By no means do I have a great Lankford collection, but I do consider it very nice.  This is my favorite of his tough parallel cards that I own.