SkyBox Metal Universe: Precious Metal Gems, PMG History & 90s Design
SkyBox Metal Universe is one of the most visually and culturally distinctive trading card products ever made. Launched by Fleer/SkyBox in 1996 across baseball and expanded to basketball in 1997-98, Metal Universe brought a design language to sports cards that had never been seen before and has never quite been replicated since.
Cards were printed on coloured, etched foil with UV coating and a space-and-fantasy aesthetic derived directly from Marvel comic book illustration. This was not coincidental: Fleer/SkyBox was owned by Marvel Entertainment at the time of the product's creation, and Marvel's professional artists contributed directly to the card backgrounds. The result was a set where the player photo appeared to exist inside a celestial or mechanical environment, making each card feel like a piece of commissioned artwork. Because of the etched foil finish, cards were notoriously condition-sensitive — edge chipping was endemic, making high-grade examples genuinely scarce.
Precious Metal Gems — known universally as PMG — are the reason Metal Universe became a permanent fixture in the hobby's collective memory. Introduced with the 1997-98 basketball release, PMG cards were allocated 100 copies per player: 10 PMG Green copies and 90 PMG Red copies. The odds of pulling a single Michael Jordan PMG from a pack were approximately 1 in 17,500, establishing PMGs as among the rarest pack-pulled inserts ever produced in a mainstream set.
By the late 2000s, PMG Green cards had become a recognised Holy Grail of modern card collecting regardless of sport. The multi-sport umbrella of the original Metal Universe brand — covering basketball, baseball, and football — means PMG collectors often pursue parallel sets across multiple sports simultaneously.
The product was revived under Upper Deck's SkyBox licence in the 2020s, with new multi-sport Champions releases carrying forward the PMG format and the original metallic design language for a new generation of collectors.
Cards were printed on coloured, etched foil with UV coating and a space-and-fantasy aesthetic derived directly from Marvel comic book illustration. This was not coincidental: Fleer/SkyBox was owned by Marvel Entertainment at the time of the product's creation, and Marvel's professional artists contributed directly to the card backgrounds. The result was a set where the player photo appeared to exist inside a celestial or mechanical environment, making each card feel like a piece of commissioned artwork. Because of the etched foil finish, cards were notoriously condition-sensitive — edge chipping was endemic, making high-grade examples genuinely scarce.
Precious Metal Gems — known universally as PMG — are the reason Metal Universe became a permanent fixture in the hobby's collective memory. Introduced with the 1997-98 basketball release, PMG cards were allocated 100 copies per player: 10 PMG Green copies and 90 PMG Red copies. The odds of pulling a single Michael Jordan PMG from a pack were approximately 1 in 17,500, establishing PMGs as among the rarest pack-pulled inserts ever produced in a mainstream set.
By the late 2000s, PMG Green cards had become a recognised Holy Grail of modern card collecting regardless of sport. The multi-sport umbrella of the original Metal Universe brand — covering basketball, baseball, and football — means PMG collectors often pursue parallel sets across multiple sports simultaneously.
The product was revived under Upper Deck's SkyBox licence in the 2020s, with new multi-sport Champions releases carrying forward the PMG format and the original metallic design language for a new generation of collectors.