In 1995, Fleer merged with the trading card company SkyBox International and, over Thanksgiving vacation shuttered its Philadelphia plant (where Dubble Bubble had been made for 67 years).

By early July, in a move similar to declaring bankruptcy, the company began to liquidate its assets to repay creditors.

Competitor Upper Deck won the Fleer name, as well as their die cast toy business, at a price of $6.1 million.

Just one year earlier, Upper Deck tendered an offer of $25 million, which was rejected by Fleer based on the hope that the sports card market would turn in a direction more favorable to their licenses and target collector demographic.

Many years later in 1959 it signed baseball star Ted Williams to a contract and sold an 80-card set oriented around highlights of his career.

Wills and Jimmy Piersall served as player representatives for Fleer, helping to bring others on board.

Fleer produced a set for the AFL while Topps cards covered the established National Football League.

The next year reverted to the status quo ante, with Fleer covering the AFL and Topps the NFL.

The company now turned its efforts to supporting an administrative complaint filed against Topps by the Federal Trade Commission.

The complaint focused on the baseball card market, alleging that Topps was engaging in unfair competition through its aggregation of exclusive contracts.

Fleer chose not to pursue such options and instead sold its remaining player contracts to Topps for $395,000 in 1966($3,344,211.42 in 2021 dollars).

Fleer returned to the union in September 1974 with a proposal to sell 5-by-7-inch satin patches of players, somewhat larger than normal baseball cards.

After several years of litigation, the Topps monopoly on baseball cards was finally broken by a lawsuit decided by federal judge Clarence Charles Newcomer in 1980, in which the judge ended Topps's exclusive right to sell baseball cards with gum, allowing Fleer to compete in the market.

Fleer's legal victory was overturned after one season, but the company continued to manufacture cards, substituting stickers with team logos for gum.

As of February 2009 the white out version has a book value of $120, but has been sold in mint condition on eBay for asking prices as high as $400.

In 1986 Fleer helped resurrect the basketball card industry by releasing an officially NBA-licensed 132-card 1986-87 Fleer Basketball set which included the rookie cards of NBA Hall of Famers Michael Jordan, Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler, Joe Dumars, Hakeem Olajuwon, Isiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley.

1998 saw the introduction of the purple Ultra Masterpieces, which are one of ones, and started the tradition of including short printed cards in the regular, Gold and Platinum sets.

Fleer was pushing into retail chains like Rite Aid, which brought the ire of the hobby dealers in the early 1990s.

Fleer was directly hurt by the 1994 Major League Baseball strike and prolonged lockouts in the NBA.

[1] In early 2005, Fleer announced that it would cease all productions of trading cards and file an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, which is a State Court liquidation, similar to Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

In July 2005, Upper Deck acquired the rights to the Fleer name and began producing Fleer-branded basketball, ice hockey and American football cards.