PRODUCTS HAVE SEEN MASSIVE PARALLEL GROWTH THROUGH THE PAST DECADE

Let’s be honest – the thrill of the chase is real. There is nothing more exciting than cracking open some sealed wax of your favorite product in hopes of pulling a card of your favorite player to collect. In fact, collecting sports cards is a national pastime, something that fans and collector’s alike have done for decades.

When sports cards gained significant popularity in the late 20th century, the focus was on the player – just getting anything with the name “Griffey”, “Jeter”, “Chipper”, or “Thomas” on it was a big deal. Checklists were simple, and as a result, some of the most valuable cards from that generation are usually error cards (I’m looking at you, No-Name Frank Thomas) or limited edition cards like the Desert Shield Chipper Jones. These types of cards are scarce, and fetch more on the open market compared to their base counterparts.

Fast-forward to the present, and we no longer need to rely on promo sets and misprints as a driver for scarcity. Now, we have the rainbow – an array of color parallels that have given collectors an extra chance on getting their hands on ultra-rare cards that help create impressive collections.

When parallels were first introduced, it was relatively simple – red, orange, gold, green, blue, purple, and your usual refractor parallel, famed 1/1 superfractor, and printing plates.

Over the last decade, the rainbow has been further proliferated. We now see color parallels that include variations in their reflective design, including shimmers, lavas, waves, raywaves, negatives, frozenfractors, mojos, and several more.

For collectors, things have gotten complicated quickly.

The chart below contains data from four products: Topps Chrome, Bowman, Bowman Chrome, and Bowman Draft. It shows how many parallels are available in each set from 2016 through 2024, broken down by subsets within each product.

While some subsets have remained stable, some have exploded.

Topps Chrome base cards, for example, featured just 15 parallels in 2016, but boasted 41 in 2024. Chrome prospects from the Bowman flagship set featured 16 in 2016 and 34 in 2024.

Identifying and keeping track of parallels is a hassle and overwhelming.

Luckily, Heystack has a solution. Using our industry-leading card recognition software, Heystack is able to identify not just parallels and serial numbers, but autographs and memorabilia cards as well.

The Heystack One, our flagship device, is meticulously engineered to deliver the highest image quality in the industry, working seamlessly with our software to ensure unparalleled (get it?) recognition accuracy.

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