What is the Difference Between Insert and Parallel Trading Cards?

When I was a young teen in the 1990's the business of baseball cards was booming. People would buy packs of cards to try and pull valuable insert cards of their favorites players. However, the dirty secrets of overproduction came out and crippled the business and the industry had to go through some changes. Insert cards are not the only sought after collectibles these days, in fact, I think they almost take a backseat to Parallel cards which is odd for reasons I will explain as we look into the differences between insert and parallel trading cards.

An insert card is a special card seeded into packs of trading cards at different numerical odds than your average trading card. It will be designed different than the regular card, usually something more flashy, and most tend to have some sort of theme. An example might be, aside from all of the base cards featuring players in a baseball series of cards, one might find a special insert of a player applauding some special achievement of theirs. Maybe they had a lot of RBIs (Runs Batted In) and can therefore be called an RBI King! One might find an insert card with some neat crown graphics and the player on it touting them as said king. The numbering on the back of the card will generally fall in line with the theme, perhaps this card would be RBI-1 as opposed to just a regular series number. Game used cards and autographed cards generally fall into the category of being an insert card.

A parallel card is a card that is not really all that different from the regular card, only to a slight degree. It will be the exact same card, same picture, only cosmetically there as been an alteration to make it unique. Parallel cards, like inserts, are meant to be harder to pull from a pack of cards. A popular type of parallel card is the refractor. A refractor card is just a card that is shiner than the regular version of the card. Then they go and make several different colors of refractors. For example, say you have a Buster Posey baseball card from a Topps Chrome trading card set. There may also be a red version, blue version, black version, green version, xfractor version, purple version, superfractor version and so on and on. These other versions are the same card, just a different color border or shiny effect added to it. Topps has also made it popular in their sports trading cards to create mini versions of cards. This means you can find a regular sized version of a card and then the parallel smaller version of the same card. Creating cards with different backs on them is another trick of the parallel game. You will find the same card with several different variations of pictures or words on the back, making it the same card, only slightly different.

Now, why would parallel cards be focused on more than insert cards in the world of modern trading card collecting? It all goes back to that era of overproduction in the 1990s. The baseball card companies were making so much money that they decided to print more and more of the cards. This killed the market for the cards because they were not rare at all. A company does not want to flood the market like this, but at the same time if they can see a way to get away with it, then of course they want to bring in as much money as possible. The parallel card gives them this opportunity. Instead of focusing on making special insert cards, they can print loads of the exact same cards and just alter a color here and there. This helps the collector feel like they are chasing after new and different things trying to complete their sets and puts their mind at ease in terms of not feeling like their card is worthless on the market do to overpopulation. If one stops to really think about it though, it does kind of cheapen the joy of having collected one of every color of your favorite player's card. Wow, you just traded money for seven copies of the same picture of some other person on cardboard.

There you have it: the differences between an insert trading card and a parallel trading card. Slightly different, yet with the same goal of trying to make trading card collecting interesting and profitable.