Hey everyone, I just noticed this thread is still going. Should have subscribed to it.
I haven't listed any of those on this site. Final Vault is just such a strange and unique release. Like I alluded to in one of my other crazy long posts about this set, we could scour eBay completed listings, COMC sold items, worthpoint, etc to try to document and catalog every single Final Vault card that we could find, but I doubt we'd be able to even scratch the surface as far as what is out there (plus that's a lot of work). So I've just kind of given up on trying to checklist them. If we're trying to add all we can for this set, I'd be open to adding them, though. I've got about double that amount of Ron Hextall's cards from the Vault at this point so it was nice to see that list again and see my progress!
There are a lot of different Vault cards out there, which makes sense as there were 15+ years of cards that went into this product. It's fun to collect for a single player but the completionist inside of me hates the fact that we'll never know exactly how many of each card exists. The commentary by vrooomed on this thread and the user comments for the set itself are spot on - you don't know how many they produced of each card! Nobody does! Having a particular color is only proof that they produced at least that many of the card.
All of this being said, there are some cards that have announced print runs in this set. The mask cards, one of which appears in every box, have gold 1/1 versions, silver /5 versions, and green versions that don't have an announced print run. The older BTP "The Mask" sets are actually nicely documented already on this site. I'd like to say we could add the "Masked Men" sets that came later on, as I seemed to be pulling them in a similar frequency/stamping to the "The Mask" cards already listed on here. However, how can we reliably confirm that all of those cards exist? Short of finding proof that every single one exists, I don't think we can. So those cards are stuck in limbo as well.
Ultimately, I look at Final Vault cards the same way as show stamped cards. With show stamped cards, you always have some uncertainty. Maybe they were part of the original print run (buybacks), maybe they weren't part of it (customer service copies). This means that we can't defnitively say that a card that was released as a 1/1 is actually /2 because of the existence of a Vault version unless we actually have the two of them side by side. Likewise, we can't say a card that was originally a PR10 is now a PR16 or a PR22 or anything else because we don't know how many copies they stamped for this product in any case.
As far as the original print run goes, I don't typically think of non-serialized show stamped cards as affecting a print run, so in my opinion these don't affect the original print run either. If they said 9 of a certain card was released in 2005-06 Between The Pipes, they put 9 of them in that product. Nothing about that has changed. If they later bought one back and stamped the three they had in their inventory with four different colored Vs, they still put 9 of them in the product back in 2005. If they had bought all of them back and set them on fire while laughing maniacally, to me the print run is still 9. I'd have a problem if they released them unstamped or if the cards were serialized like UD or Panini and now there were two number 78/99s out in the world or something like that, but the fact that we can differentiate between a "real" one and a "Vault" one keeps this OK in my book.
However, speaking of unstamped, let's also throw in this little bit of extra insanity:
"Collectors will also find bonus hits in random boxes that feature cards produced for previous products, but were never actually released because of production or timing issues. The unreleased cards will be the 11th hit in these boxes and will be the only cards that aren't stamped."
So, let's recap that for those of you keeping score at home: there are also an unspecified number of unstamped cards that are actually unreleased cards from previous releases but which are technically part of this release so maybe those should be the only cards we could include on this list except for that fact that we do not, to my knowledge, even have any information on what those cards are.
Pure insanity. That alone should probably dissuade any attempts to create a complete checklist for this release.
I feel bad going as far as saying that we shouldnt list anything for this set, as there is a lot of quality to the checklists and scans that are already submitted. That being said, I see no way to make a full checklist without ITG, from beyond the grave, releasing specific card-by-card print run (stamp run?) information. Since that will likely never happen, I think it's doubtful we'll ever have the data necessary to produce a quality checklist that meets the high standards of the rest of this site.
