Thursday, June 2, 2016

Five new Seneca Customs from Blowout

These cards were a long time in the making, as both the designer and card builder were going through a lot of life changes in the process of these cards.  They probably took about three weeks to fully design and then building was delayed for like five months due to the guy moving and changing jobs.  But I'm a patient guy, and the cards are amazing, so let's just look at them since they're here now!

The idea for these cards was to put Seneca in a few more "vintage" sets that I like.  Now I know the 1994-2002 era isn't really vintage, but it's cards that were cool to me when I was young, so I liked the idea of getting Seneca in some of those sets.  I also wanted to get more customs of Seneca with his lesser known clubs.  So definitely no Seahawks allowed, and ideally I'd end up with a Packers card, 49ers card, and Saints card (and you'll see I did).


The first one is my favorite given the incredible level of detail on the front and back.  It's kind of a hybrid of 1997 and 1998 ultra, with the 1998 ultra Basketball Gold Medallion front, and looks like this:
These are some great shots of Seneca, and I love the way that the script came out on the front.  I say the card is a hybrid of 1997 and 1998 because 1998 had the career highlights and white shading for the stats, while 1997 didn't have lines differentiating between teams within the stats.  It's great having a card that shows Seneca's entire careers stats, and it's also really neat that the designer added in the fact that Seneca was the first ever African American starting QB for the Packers.  Great card.

The next card is an homage to 1994 Collector's Choice, and after going through several signature colors we settled on the silver signature edition.  Here's the front and back of the Saints card:
We tried red and blue for the signature, but they both looked way too bold and didn't really work out.  The back is more the designer's than the actual sets, but I LOVE it because the stats are so particular.  Thing is, Seneca played only one preseason game for the Saints, and this back mentions not only the stats for that game, but also the date Seneca was cut by the Saints.  That's some impressive attention to detail.


The next card is from one of my all time favorite sets, 1995 Topps.  We went with the Cyberstats parallel, because then it was possible to have fun making up amazing stats:
After a humdrum 2011, Seneca EXPLODED in 2012 with a 92% completion percentage, 62:3 TD:INT ratio, and an additional 8 touchdowns rushing.  In reality, Seneca was a backup who didn't play at all in 2012, but had he played these very well might have been the stats he ended up with.  Obviously.

I'll put the two Browns cards together, with this other card being a nod to 2002 Pacific Adrenaline.  I've always loved the frantic blurriness of these fronts combined with the simplicity of the backs, so it was great to finally get a custom from this set:
Originally the designer messed up the height and weight on the back, and I almost kept it that way as an error card but in the end had him change it.  I also really dig the nod to the Seahawks on the back of the card - it's still a Browns card, but like with a lot of companies you still get that mismatch of uniforms due to it being a better shot for the card overall.

The last card is the 49ers custom.  It's a reference to 1998 Score, and I thin the color scheme goes very well together:
 
These Score backs have a lot of text going on, and the end result was a nice little writeup of Seneca's entire career.  I kind of like this card as a final card for Seneca, showcasing one of his final jerseys while also summing up what ended up being one heck of a career for the guy.

With these cards, I now have a whopping 14 customs in my Seneca Wallace collection!  It's fun to see what people can whip up while filling team gaps that the major card companies missed, so I'm sure I'll add more as time goes by!

1 comment:

  1. NFL Network had a show on the other day called "top 10 trick plays". They showed Seneca scoring on an end-around.

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