I sketched up an idea and I hit up my friends: ‘I think I want to make a sneaker trading card set around the shoes Kobe wore throughout his career, what do you think?’ I’m talking about die-hard Laker

I sketched up an idea and I hit up my friends: ‘I think I want to make a sneaker trading card set around the shoes Kobe wore throughout his career, what do you think?’ I’m talking about die-hard Laker fans. I’m talking 5-10 people I’ve known for more than half of my life...people I trust implicitly...Every single person - even those who don’t care about shoes nor cards - said ‘I would LOVE to own a set of those cards’. Over the course of a couple of weeks, we fleshed out the idea of a fitting Kobe tribute set - for the shoes - for the fans. It’s a sneaker trading card set that revolves around the shoes that @kobebryant wore throughout his career 
 
I latched onto a name before I latched onto a structure or aesthetic - I wanted to call it the ‘824 pack’. 824 for the obvious reference to Kobe’s jersey numbers and the date I wanted to release it.  
 
As I’m thinking of how to build out this idea, I’m watching 'influencers' talking about cards, rips, and investments. Everyone is looking for the next great rip. Everyone is cashing in.  
 
I began looking at what’s been coming out and, although they look great and are going for bags of money and people seem to love them, I don’t really understand the logic behind them. There seems to be no cohesion between sets, there seems to be no continuity structure - instead of representing a moment in time, ie: the 2019-2020 basketball season, why are there Charles Barkley & Larry Johnson cards in a 2019-2020 set? They retired almost 20 years ago. I don’t get it.  
 
I looked at one set - Panini Mosaic 2019 - downloaded the complete checklist (a CSV file!) and there are literally 11,226 different cards on that checklist. There are roughly 450 ACTIVE basketball players for the 2019-2020 season, yet there are over 11,000 different cards for this set? I mean I get the idea of parallels and all that, but ELEVEN THOUSAND DIFFERENT CARDS? I dunno…if I had OCD about collecting (and I do) and I wanted to collect a complete set...is it even possible?  
 
Maybe I read the numbers wrong or something, but I just couldn’t make sense of it. Can anyone explain this to me? What's the logic?  

I'm gonna make my set logically...