Sports cards

Mosaic

Also written: Mosaic Prizm · Mosaic parallel

A refractive finish tiled into small mosaic shapes — and also the name of the Panini product line built around it.

PatternThe reflective layer is textured or shaped

Mosaic is a refractive finish tiled into small repeating shapes, so the light breaks up across the card the way it does on a tiled wall. It is also the name of a Panini product line built around that finish — which is where nearly all the confusion about the word comes from.

The brand and the parallel are different things

Inside a Mosaic product, "Mosaic" appears twice: once as the product name and once as the name of a specific parallel finish. A set line reading Mosaic once is telling you which product the card is from. A set line where the word appears again after the dash — or beside a colour — is naming the parallel. This is why a card can honestly be described as a "Mosaic Mosaic", and why reading everything after the dash matters more here than anywhere else in the catalogue.

How to spot the finish

• Small repeating tiles across the whole card, including over the photograph.
• The tiles are regular — unlike cracked ice, which is irregular and branching.
• The effect reads at a shallower angle than most pattern parallels, so it survives a scan better than wave or hyper does.

Mosaic products carry their own colour ladders and their own inserts, and the inserts have parallels of their own. As always, the colour and any serial number decide the rung; the pattern only tells you which family you are in.

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