By 1996, my collecting focus had shifted almost entirely to basketball cards. The 1994-95 season was my freshman year in college, and two of my best friends were big Duke fans. Clearly, the Grant Hill rookie chase drove many of those purchases as the three of us collected together. I still bought a few packs during the 1995-96 season, but my attention and my limited income were becoming more focused on music and figuring out how to pay for college.
A few years earlier, the 1994 baseball strike had jaded me, and for next several years, my interest in baseball was gone. I can’t remember buying a single pack of baseball cards after the strike.
That’s a long winded way to say I did not buy any 1996 Upper Deck baseball cards.
There are still a whole host of sets and inserts from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s that I’ve never seen. Up until this spring, 1996 Upper Deck Diamond Destiny was one of those.
That changed as I was sorting out truckload of cards I had purchased. One of the boxes contained a handful of Upper Deck cards with a translucent plastic cutout. I thought they were kind of cool, and so I wanted to do some research and put out a blog post about them.
It turns out, these Diamond Destiny cards were one per pack inserts in the Wal-Mart exclusive “Tech” configurations. There were also silver and gold parallels which fell 1:35 and 1:143 packs respectively.
1996 Upper Deck Tony Gwynn Diamond Destiny Insert
There were 40 cards in this set and the checklist features some fantastic names. Ken Griffey Jr, Derek Jeter, Fred McGriff, and Ozzie Smith join the other 36 stars to make a pretty sweet set.
The cards featured a full body action image of the player over the team logo based background. In the upper right quadrant of the card, a thin translucent plastic cutout had another headshot of the player. It kind of reminds me of the image you’d see when looking through one of those old viewfinder toys.
I love the creativity of the design and the use of different materials in these cards. I would have gone after these hard if I had been actively collecting in 1996.
If you want to pick some of these up for your collection, you will find the super cool design does not lead to super expensive prices. The vast majority of these inserts can be found for less than $1 on Sportlots and COMC. The Griffey Jr. and Jeter could run up to about $10.
If you want to challenge yourself, the silver and gold parallels can be a little tougher to track down, and they run quite a bit higher. As a frame of reference, a gold Barry Bonds sold for about $100 in the spring of 2023 but you can find them a bit cheaper from time to time.
I think this set provides a great example of the type of product that can appeal to player collectors, set builders, insert lovers, and junk wax era fans.
Did you collect these back in 1996? Or were you like me and didn’t discover it until years later?
Let me know and tell me your story in the comments below!
Also, if you haven’t heard, I have a Podcast called the WaxPackHero Sports Card Minute! It’s available here directly on the site at the Podcast link at the top of the page, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, and TuneIn!
Check it out, let me know what you think, and tell your friends!