Cards Mania: Uncovering the Hidden Gems and Surprising Facts of Trading Cards

A Unique Mistake: Gary Pettis' Brother on His 1985 Topps Card In an unexpected twist, the 1985 Topps baseball card that was supposed to feature Gary Pettis, a former Angels outfielder and current Astros third-base coach, showcased his brother instead. Gary Pettis' 1985 Topps Card After a successful season with the then-California Angels, Gary Pettis was set to be featured in the Topps pack. However, fans were met with a surprise when they found a much younger face on the card. As Gary recalls, "When I was playing with the Angels, one of the other players on my team had a son. My brother would come out to the ballpark on Sundays, and they'd dress up in uniforms and they'd go out on the field and shag fly balls and run around. I guess this happened to be one Sunday where they were taking the pictures for the Topps baseball cards. I had no idea that was going on that day. [My brother] was out on the field and at the t...

Lets leave sport cards for a while and tell a few words about  Magic: The Gathering - First modern trading card game (MTG). Dr. Richard Garfield created the first Magic core set: Alpha, which was bought by Wizards of the Coast and released in August 1993. Due to popular demand, a second Beta print run was released two months later, followed by a renamed Unlimited Edition. Richard dubbed the game Magic when he originally created it. Because the name was too simple to trademark, it was altered to Mana Clash. Because everyone kept referring to it as Magic, they looked into what they needed to do in order to refer to it as such. To make it more unique, the solution was to add something to it. Because the intention was to continually modifying the sub names, Richard chose "The Gathering" as a starting point.

This was always my favorite part - did You know?? As the first fun fact in this long (hopefully) series we will present a bit of information about some very interesting cards introduced by Topps long time ago - Hocus Focus Magic Photo . From the very beginning guys from marketing of all companies, that decided to have their own trading cards were working on more and more collectible, interesting, fun, and attractive cards. In the end... it’s all business. They wanted to sell the product and card was a great marketing "device" - but You always have to be one step ahead. Tobacco cards in cigs was not enough anymore. And one day Topps found a very interesting solution. Have You ever met a blank card? Well... if so, this was not a misprint, it was Hocus Focus!! Back in 1948-49 Topps had an idea to make a package for bubble gums out of trading cards. Wouldn’t be that much surprise if not the fact, that the cards were blank. You had to put a bit of water on the surface and then us...

Before we talk a bit about Pokémon  card  game , we definitely should write a few words on where all did come from :) Long time ago a man called Satoshi Tajiri , big fan of bugs (some say, he wanted to become an entomologist) started to create games. His (and his friends) first productions were Pulseman , Yoshi and Mario & Wario . Those games were not a big success, but they were quite popular on the market. After some time, around 1990, still having this "bug geek" thoughts, Satoshi realized, that this might work out and invented Pocket Monsters. Nintendo was his first choice. It took some time to convince Nintendo to his idea, but when he finally did it, he immediately began working on the game ...

Nowadays, trading cards, collectible cards and all other cards are huge business with millions of dollars behind it. It doesn`t matter if it is a sport card, movie card or just a card released to promote something. Some are valued few cents, other can reach up millions for a single card. Have You ever wondered how it began? Well... this is a short story about it. Some say, that it all started somewhere around 1880 when John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter set up a company named... yes, you are right: Allen & Ginter. I will not focus on its history as a tobacco company obviously (nowadays its not politically correct to talk about cigs;), but Allen & Ginter had a very interesting idea of how to develop marketing of their products. Cigarette manufacturers were using paper cards putted inside cig packs to prevent cigarettes from being squeezed. They created and introduced cigarette card for collecting and trading purposes. Now the trade mark of Allen & Ginter is used by some other c...