I’m not sure how it didn’t dawn on me before now but I’ve been doing these fake cards long enough to have made 10 years worth of Spirit base designs. This fake card company has had its ups and downs along the way. Years where I made dozens of unique base, insert, parallel designs as well as years where I pumped out close to the bare minimum to keep this whole thing afloat. A lot of that has to do with life in general as well as the ebbs and flow of my passion for baseball and the collecting world. Lately I’ve found myself spending more time tweaking other stuff rather than spending time on wholly new designs. Perhaps the inspiration tank is running low. Nevertheless, I still love designing cards and plan on doing it in some capacity so long as I have the time.

That said, I thought it’d be nice to have all 10 of the Spirit base designs in one place to see the journey a little more clearly.

Seeing the progression from the 2012 Belt to the 2020 Margot, I can honestly say that none of them are embarrassing (which was definitely a fear). Is there room for improvement? Oh, most definitely. Are a few of them similar and/or derivative? You betcha. Could you rearrange the order without them looking drastically out of place? Probably. Am I proud of them? Without a doubt.

I’d love to see these ranked like one of those polls/lists/tournaments that pop up from time-to-time discussing Topps and their 70 different base designs. It would definitely be more objective since there aren’t biases like childhood nostalgia or print technology advances to cloud people’s choices. Maybe I’ll take the time put something like that together.