We were at it again this week. Another extraction mission carried out perfectly by our trained team of professionals, or as they're known around here, Sealed Team Six. The target this time was an unopened pack of 1991 Topps Desert Shield Baseball cards. Originally intended for United States soldiers serving in Iraq during active operations, the set is one of the more prized baseball issues of the last thirty years. The cards themselves look exactly like their 1991 Topps counterparts with the exception of a gold foil stamp on the front featuring a palm tree inside of a shield and the words "Operation Desert Shield" beside an American Flag. When you consider the fact that these sets were distributed exclusively overseas and had a relatively limited production, it's easy to understand why demand so quickly outweighed supply at the time of their release. Add to it that fact that many of the cards given to soldiers ended up being lost in the turmoil of war, moving from base to base, back home, or just thrown away to minimize what a soldier had to carry with him and that pool of available product shrank even smaller. And then there's the rumor that's floated around the hobby that one of the distribution centers where the cards were being kept caught fire destroying a significant portion of the entire run. Now whether that final tidbit is true or not, what's known is that only 6,800 of each card were produced to begin with and to date only a handful have surfaced in pristine condition. So with the that in mind and an opportunity to retrieve high-grade copies of #1 Ryan, #150 Ripken, #270 McGwire, #333 C. Jones RC, #570 Bonds or #790 Griffey Jr. we turned the lights down and the camera on. Here's what happened...................
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