Diamond, diamonds everywhere

Recently, my wife just celebrated a milestone birthday. Wanting to mark the occasion, I splurged on a pair of diamond stud earrings for her. It was definitely more than I tend to spend on any gift, but she means the world to me and I wanted to make this particular birthday a little more special.

As you probably know, diamonds are not cheap. But my Jeter autograph can wait.

To hold me over, I satisfied my diamond fix as well in the form of 1999 Upper Deck Black Diamond.

This is a “double diamond” parallel, so my wife and I both got a pair of diamonds, you might say. It is numbered to 3000.

In 1999, Upper Deck was spitting out sets at a ridiculous rate (I count 19 different), so some were pretty forgettable. While Black Diamond seemingly never caught fire, I think the made some decent looking cards. The problem is that between these, Ovation, HoloGRFX, Ionix, none really were overly memorable and meshed together a little bit, looking back.

Still, for a player collector, the 90s were an awesome time because of sheer quantity of sets from each manufacturer. Throw some parallels like this on top of that, and I’ll be chasing Tino cards forever.

And I’m ok with that.