Acetate Appreciation: 1998 Topps Tek

The first in a series highlighting acetate, the clear plastic cards that I for some strange reason have loved since opening packs of 1993 Classic Hockey as a kid. The first set I am profiling is the bizarre 1998 Topps Tek set. At first look you have a 90 card base set with all kinds of wacky patterns, but those patterns are actually a parallel of sorts. I am not a fan of parallels and get annoyed by brands like Bowman that seem to suffer from parallel overload, but Topps Tek took this to new heights. Each card in the set of 90 had 90 different patterns with a Diffractor, a refractor style card seeded at one per 6 packs, paralleling each pattern making a grand total of 180 different cards of each player. That makes a total of 8,100 cards in the set, with each of these having a Diffractor for a master set of 16,200 different cards. This is not including the Pre-Production Promo cards of Mark McGwire, Raul Mondesi and Roger Clemens of which I do not know how many patterns are available. I would love to sit down and have a few beers with whoever came up with this idea and just ask them "What the hell?".