1995 Upper Deck SP Football Wax Box: Premier Prospects, Holoviews and What It Sells For

Configuration

A 1995 SP hobby box holds 32 foil packs of eight cards. The base set is 200 cards. Don't confuse it with 1995 SP Championship, a separate Upper Deck football product with its own box and checklist. The two names appear together in a lot of listings.

Where the rookies are

Most of the rookie cards sit in the etched-foil Premier Prospects subset at the front of the set:

• #1 Ki-Jana Carter
• #3 Steve McNair
• #5 Kerry Collins
• #18 Curtis Martin

The order of the first few cards follows the 1995 draft. Cincinnati took Carter first overall, but a knee injury in his first preseason derailed his career, and his card is now the cheapest of the four. The Houston Oilers took McNair third, and the expansion Carolina Panthers made Collins their first-ever draft pick at fifth. Martin, a third-round pick by New England, outlasted all three.

Other rookies are spread through the main checklist. Terrell Davis is the biggest of them, and Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks are Hall of Famers too, as is Curtis Martin. Joey Galloway, Rashaan Salaam, J.J. Stokes, Tamarick Vanover, Michael Westbrook and Jeff Blake round out the rookie list.

Curtis Martin and Terrell Davis are the cards most buyers open the box hoping for, ahead of the two quarterbacks taken near the top of the draft. That inversion is common in 1990s football and is worth keeping in mind before paying for a box on the strength of the first page of the checklist.

Terrell Davis is the clearest case. A sixth-round pick in 1995, he ran for 2,008 yards in 1998, was that season's MVP, won two Super Bowls with Denver and went into the Hall of Fame in 2017. Curtis Martin retired with 14,101 rushing yards and was inducted in 2012. Between them they are why a 1995 box is priced above the cheapest mid-90s football, even though the two quarterbacks drafted near the top had very different careers. Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks, both inducted, add two defensive Hall of Famers that most mid-90s sets cannot match.

Inserts and the odds

The Holoviews are the signature of this era of SP: a hologram portrait set into the card, which looked futuristic in 1995 and now photographs badly, so condition is hard to judge from a listing picture. The Marino card is a horizontal etched-foil card for his career touchdown-pass record, and at 1:363 packs it is the rarest regular insert in the box.

What it costs, and what a box is worth opened

At the low end, a sealed box costs about the same as 32 loose packs at the cheapest pack price. That makes the box the better buy, because loose packs carry the searching risk a factory-sealed box does not. 1996 SP, a year later, costs more again. Neither box is cheap to fill out as a set, since the Premier Prospects cards are what disappear first.

Opened, an average box rarely returns its price. The money is in a clean Terrell Davis or Curtis Martin that grades well, and etched foil from this period tends to show edge wear, so many pulls grade lower than collectors hope. Buy a box to open it for the experience, or keep it sealed. Don't buy one expecting to come out ahead on the cards.

Checking the wrap

The common problems with boxes of this age are:

• re-shrunk boxes with thick, cloudy plastic;
• seams on the ends rather than folded neatly underneath;
• boxes where the pack count no longer fills the tray, which you can sometimes see as sag in the lid.

Ask for photos of the bottom of the box as well as the top. Card shows are good for this, because you can handle the box. Find one on our card show calendar. Online:

• 1995 Upper Deck SP Football wax box factory sealed -championship
• 1995 SP Football pack sealed