GT Show Finds: ZAIP!

I limped out the door of the GT Sports card show late Friday night with a bag full of finds. After more than three hours of sifting through quarter boxes and hobbling around the floor, I spent about $80 and ended up with somewhere around 500 cards. Some of those are headed for the Cardboard Zoo, and it will be months before I need to scan more after hours of work yesterday. I found a small handful of set needs, several cards for my player collections, and what I hope to be a successful assault on my Awards/Leaders collection. 

As always, I'm going to milk this as long as I can, so bit by bit, I bring you the first of my GT Show Finds!

ZAIP!

No overhyped relic-replacing manupatches here. These foil-etched, photo-filled letters have more style than any of those poorly-autographed letters. I like manupatches, but when I saw these all together I had to grab them. If reverse spelling is too difficult for you, these are the "PIAZ" in "PIAZZA" and if you look at his name towards the bottom, each Z and A have separate cards (the placement of the letter is in yellow). This set comes from 1997 New Pinnacle, but the set saw a second release in 1998 Pinnacle. The 2005 Zenith set again copied the format with a few more players, a gold parallel, and a relic version.

I'm not really a Piazza fan, but finding 67% of a full player set for less than a buck inspired me to try to finish it. I'm looking for cards 5 and 6, the second Z and second A, of course! In internet-land, these cards don't come so cheap - Piazza books for $8/card and the cheapest A is about $4 on COMC.