1993 Upper Deck Baseball Forum

So I came across a good number of 1993 Upper Deck cards yesterday and was able to unbrick most of them with little to no damage.  (2 jeter's and a manny safe).  I have a couple questions for the masses with reguard to these:

1.  Is there any way to prevent these from "Bricking" again?

2. Will penny sleeves prevent this or will they inturn just stick to the inside of the penny sleeve?

3.  Are these bricked in the packs too?  I did pick up 2 boxes of series two still sealed, but I am now wondering if I need to crack them in order to save any cards that can be in there or if they are fine still in the packs?

(For those unaware as I was until starting to collect again, Bricking was an issue with the higher gloss cards where when stored together for a while the gloss would stick to the adjacent card and would cause damage to both cards IF you could get them apart at all)

I just recently bought a couple of boxes of these and virtually all of the cards in every pack were bricked. Most were damaged when I tried to "unbrick" them. It was a terrible experience. 

Store them very loosely!

One more note on this subject. I tried putting some of the packs in the freezer as I have heard that it can help. No difference whatsoever.

Grrrrrr....not what I wanted to hear really, but I guess I will have to crack at least one of them to see what it looks like.  Maybe I can crack some of them this weekend to see what comes of it....

Yeah, I've spent hours researching options to unstick cards and none of them were viable.  Tried the freezer method, as well as the steam method (hold cards over a pot of boiling water).  No luck.  You may just have to crack them.  Would love to find out that I'm wrong, 

To answer the penny sleeve question, in my experience, once they are in sleeves the UV coating don't stick to the plastic of the sleeve.  Some other card coatings (like Finest, Chrome, etc.) can "stick" to a sleeve through static cling, but won't damage the card surface.  The bricking is from one card's UV-coating sticking to another card's UV-coating.

In a box of Score hockey I bought ('96-97, I think), nearly all cards were stuck together, especially down the middle aligning with the wrapper seam/fold.  However, the "Golden Blades" parallels, which had a canvas-like surface texture, did not stick to either side.

In baseball, I think the first set to "brick" was the 1993 Upper Deck.  The following year, many of the 1994 sets have been found with the same issue.  I know of Bowman, Donruss, Fleer, Score and again Upper Deck that did the same.  Breaking them apart is difficult but I think the least damage is to take a "brick" and give it a slight opposite force twist or bend the brick slightly in the middle from both ends.  Though this will usually break them apart, at best, often slightly noticeable flaking will still be apparent.

I recently was pulling some 1994 Fleer cards; every so often I would see some of this flaking.  It actuall can fool you into thinking that it is sand being thrown up near the player if it is a picture of him sliding into a base.

I cannot say for sure when the companies finally changed the finish on their cards but I know there is some of this issue even into the 2001, and possibly 2003 Topps sets.  Penny sleeves work; if boxing sets, use a box larger than the set size.

Thanks Bruno (and all that added).....I think I am going to go through them tonight and sleeve them all just to prevent from happing again.  I will crack at least one of the boxes to see how the cards are too......hoping for the best!

Off the top of my head, I know all of the 1999-2000 Upper Deck hobby with the same design have a problem with the coating sticking to other cards as well as the insides of plastic sheets, and if you don't peel them off carefully, they end up ruined.