1991 Donruss - Retail vs Factory Set and how to spot the difference

 Greetings fellow Yount-o-philes. 

Over the last couple year's the diligent members of the Trading Card Database have been adding all the minutia variations from the junk wax era.  I was combing through my collection and the TCDb to see if I could add any of the new variations and I was able to add about 10 cards not previously parsed out.

I've posted about the common Donruss variation with the missing period at the end of Donruss Inc at least with the 88 set.  Another variation that affects the 1990 and 1991 sets are that the borders between the retail (or rather pack distributed) cards and the one's put in the boxed factory set are different.  It may be hard to see at first and if you didn't have both side by side the very 90s design might fly right by you.  But on closer inspection the two border designs are almost completely different.

I have  maybe 50 1991 Yount Donruss cards (maybe more I didn't count them up) and after looking through all of them I was only able to find one factory set specimen.  Of course the factory sets were produced in significantly smaller numbers than the various pack out items, but even so that could me cards produced around 100,000 instead of 1 million.  

1990 Donruss Variations

 I have to say, maybe it's because I opened so much of this product, but 1990 Donruss is one of my least favorite sets of all time.  I lovingly refer to this set as the vomit set.  The color variations used for the Best of the NL and AL sets helped, but the base red just, well it gets old.  That being said like sets previous and after there are a few variations to look for, if you're into that.  

Again this year has the missing period after the INC in the copyright. 

I looked through my stack of 1990 Yount cards and I found both the INC. and INC pretty equally distributed through my stack.

And another reoccurring theme is a slight difference between the wax pack cards and the ones printed for the factory set.  This time it's an almost imperceivable difference in the splattering on the border on the front of the card.  Here have a look.

The card on the right is the factory set card

The card on the right in this picture is also the factory set card 

I literally was driving myself batty on TCDB.com trying to figure out what the difference was until I had to do a google search about the difference, but once you see it, it is there. 

1988 Donruss Variations

 Continuing our look at the variation cards Robin had in various Donruss products in the late 80s and early 90s, next up we have the three documented variations in the 1988 set.

Again the three variations are small, literally just a dot on one card and a factory set variation that has to do with the text on the back of the card.

Again, and this seems to be a reoccurring variation through the years, is the period missing on the INC in the copyright.

I have no idea on actual rarity but I looked through every 1988 Yount I had (about 50) and all of them had the period.  So I shot over to COMC which does differentiate between the pack and factory set version, but not the missing period variations and grabbed a copy for the collection.  (It'll only be a year before I actually get it though and I paid a bit of a premium for it.)

The factory set variation has to do with the text  on the bottom of the card.  The last line of the factory set starts with (367) where the pack varieties, both with and without the period on the INC, start with "total bases"

I ended up finding two mixed in with my 1988's so obviously slightly rarer than the pack cards, but Donruss still make tens, if not hundreds, of thousands boxed sets, so very findable.