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Tribute is pretty incredible every year. Retro Good Label always nice. Hard to pick one and really there could be categories. '89 Upper Deck is still pretty cool
Rough list of my favorites for design, photography, and checklist. Depending on what you consider "base," but there are lots of sets out there now really cheap even if they were high-end at the time, like 1991 Topps Stadium Club.
1991 Topps
1955 Bowman
1941 Play Ball
1975 Topps
1972 Topps
1965 Topps
1985 Donruss
1989 Upper Deck
2010 Topps
2011 Topps (2010 & 2011 are especially nice in chrome)
2006 Allen & Ginter
2017 Gypsy Queen
1957 Topps
I've not been pleased with Topps base designs for the past few years, but they seem designed for Chrome, where they usually really pop, especially colored parallels. 2013 was especially frustrating. Really clean design but boring white paper borders were boring. But colored refs were sweet.
Favorite vintage is 1955 Bowman, the TV set is so cool to me, 38 goudey heads up needs an honorable mention. Few I like in the 80s if I had one to pick I'd say 89 Topps. 90s lots to pick from but it's close for me between 93 finest and 1998 E-X, Topps Tek needs to be there too but I'm not sure how to categorize that. Moving forward I've lost touch with all the base sets but 2003 diamond Kings and 2013 Topps caught my eye.