Some of the Stupidest Ideas in Football Trading Card History

1993 Wild Card Regional Inserts

Hey, did you live in South Bend, Indiana, where Jerome Bettis's alma mater, Notre Dame, is located? Or did you live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he'd have the finest moments of his career?



Well, then you couldn't get this card.
During their short existence, Wild Card lived up to their name, coming up with all sorts of crazy-ass ideas. Sometimes, they had good ones, like their trademark Wild Stripes, which not only meant that you could conceivably find a card worth over $100 in any pack of any product they made, but was also the first ever parallel insert, which is something included in basically every card set made today. But then, they also had bad ideas, and this one in 1993 was one of their worst. One of the things Wild Card was known for was to have a ton of inserts, which was another part of what made them so cool, after the stripes and other redemption cards. But in 1993, they decided to up the number from a ton to a metric fuck-ton. Okay, that's not so bad. But they also decided to split them up by region. As in states in the western U.S. only got packs that contained inserts from western division teams, central states only got central division inserts, etc. This was already a stupid-assed idea in that it cut two-thirds of the country out of certain cards. For example, if you lived in California, you had no hope of getting a special insert of players like Barry Sanders, Emmit Smith, or big time rookies like Drew Bledsoe. Add the complication of the retarded way the NFL split up the divisions at the time, and it got worse. Like if you were crazy and/or stupid enough to be a Phoenix (that's what they were called still) Cardinals fan, those cards were only way the hell over on the East Coast. One possible motivation for this was the idea that hardcore collectors and dealers would spend three times as much money, taking the mail order route to bring in boxes from other regions. But seriously, who would be that stupid?



Oh yeah, me. But fuck you guys, I got special cards of Jerome Bettis AND Drew Bledsoe.

Topps Finest Protectors:



Well, on one hand, chrome cards are prone to getting scuffed up, so it is a good idea to stick an extra layer of plastic over the fronts to keep that from happening. But... Um... Hey Topps? You know, Score did the same thing with the Select Certified set one year, but here's the thing: That extra plastic stuff that's all static-clinged to the front? Theirs didn't have writing on it. You know, you guys could have just left a note on the outside of the pack or something to tell us about the glory of the Finest Protector, instead of making the cards look like shit. What we're left with is this eyesore, and we can't peel the thing off, because then, the card won't be worth anything anymore. Good job, guys.

Pacific Card Supials:

Hey look, I got a special insert card of Michael Westbrook!



Ah, but I didn't get the entire card, you see.



See, this card is an idea Pacific first got somewhere in the late 1990s called a (get ready for this) "Card Supial." You know, like "marsupial," like a kangaroo, with a pocket and all. Real clever. So you'd get a card that would be relatively hard to find, but to get the full effect, you'd have to get another card, which would also be hard to find, and slide it into that little slit cut in the back. So if you only found the little one, you'd have this tiny card that would be easy to lose, and once you found two of them, you risked damage to both cards by squeezing it in that pocket, which left little room on either side. But it's not just the stupidity of this idea that gets me; it's the sheer randomness of it all. What could possibly lead to an idea like the Card Supial? Well, after much deliberation, I have found the answer:


WEED.
Lots and lots of weed. Think about it. Imagine this statement in your head, which is where stuff tends to be imagined: "Okay, here's an idea. We're gonna make these cards, right? Except they'll be like TWO cards. And one is all tiny and goes INSIDE the other card!" Any sane person would have then imagined this statement being immediately followed by a "pppffffttttt" sound and a dude trying desperately not bust out laughing, while going "riiiight on, duuuuuuuude," which would then be followed by everyone in the room laughing for like three minutes, which would then be followed by one of them pointing to the first guy and going "you are so HIGH, dude," and more group laughter. This is the secret of the Pacific Trading Card Company.

Early Collector's Edge Serial Numbers



When Collector's Edge first burst onto the scene in 1992, they were a company with big ideas. First of all, they had one of the best ideas ever in that instead of paper, they would make the cards out of plastic, ensuring that rounded off corners would be a thing of the past. (Unfortunately, this idea didn't catch on, and even Edge themselves eventually quit using plastic card stock around '97 or so) Second of all, in the wake of perceived high print runs sucking any value out of brands like Pacific and Pro Set, they were hell-bent on keeping the print runs low, including ad campaigns focusing on how they shred the printing plates, ensuring only one printing. Also, in a bold, crazy-ass move, each card would be given a unique serial number. On one hand, this sounds like a great idea to emphasize the low print runs they talked about in the magazine ads. But you see, something having a serial number doesn't mean that there isn't many of that particular item. Hell, a one dollar bill has a serial number, and there are hundreds of those. So instead of making it seem as though each Collector's Edge card was a unique treasure, these serial numbers had a very different effect:



They let you know that there were ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND of the card you had just gotten. Granted, that was probably way less than what just about any other set at the time had, but notice that I said "probably." That's because all the other brands were smart enough to keep the available numbers a secret. And that's why the '92 Collector's Edge Emmitt Smith that there are only a hundred thousand of is only worth a buck more than the 1992 Pinnacle one that there are like seventy trillion of.

1996 Pacific "The Zone" Inserts:



Like I've alluded to many times here, the 90s were a time of crazy-ass ideas, and one of the most popular was the die-cut card. They were different and neat-looking, but they've been mostly abandoned by now, because they usually just meant more corners to get all screwed up. But like I said, they looked cool, so I can't consider die-cut cards in general to be a stupid idea. But these. Oh man, these fucking things. Just in case you don't understand what's going on with these, take a look at that card up there. Those white areas above the arched Robert Brooks picture aren't part of the card; they're the white underside of the lid of my scanner. Okay. Now, with that in mind, look at the white areas above the black/gold foil Pacific Logo and underneath the yellow goal posts. Yeah, that's just my scanner, too. So what you have here is an entire set of fairly rare, fairly valuable (that Robert Brooks is worth 4 bucks, and he's not exactly Emmitt Smith or Brett Favre in terms of card value) set of cards, where the middle of the card is seriously about a centimeter across. And I understand that as card collectors over the age of five, we're expected to handle these damn things with some level of care, but god damn, just sliding one of those things into a top-loader without destroying the thing in horrible ways is like wrestling with the fucking devil. What the hell was Pacific thinking when they designed these? Oh, that's right:


"Duuuude, these new The Zone cards are kinda... Wait... Whoa, your head is HUGE."

Phone Cards



This was another early 90s "innovation" that was a pretty good idea until you thought about it for more than thirty seconds. You see, back before everyone on Earth had a cell phone and could call Guam for three cents a minute, people without actual long distance could by phone cards. These cards had either a set number of minutes or amount of money on them, and you could dial whatever number was on the card to use that until the card had been used up, at which point you tossed it and bought a new card. So somebody (I can't remember who was first, but I'm thinking it was either Classic or Upper Deck) got the idea of combining them with sports cards. On one hand this was cool, because it gave the cards a "real" value, as opposed to some imaginary one you looked up in a price guide. So finding that one Emmitt Smith phone card with $1500 worth of long distance on it was basically like finding a $1500 trading card. Ah, but that's where the conflict begins: Phone cards had expiration dates on them. So what do you do? Scratch off the silvery stuff on the back to expose the PIN number and use that $1500 of phone calls to Guam? Or just say fuck Guam and preserve the card, but lose that "real" value once the card expires? The aforementioned '95 Classic $1500 Emmitt Smith is worth $500 now, a net loss of $1000 in potential calls to grandma. It's a moot point anyway, I suppose, because they were hard as hell to find, and if you did find one, so chances are, it was going to be a $1-5 one, which basically meant like a minute and a half of talk time, tops. Which is also stupid.

1997 Playoff Absolute Chip Shots




These were a creative idea for an insert in packs of '97 Absolute that were unique in that they weren't cards at all. They were plastic poker chips with NFL players on them, and that's almost not a stupid idea. If they had waited a few years for the Texas Hold 'Em craze to take off, they could have really had something. Also, if they hadn't decided to make a one-per-pack insert into a set that included about two hundred chips, which meant that your chances of getting some shitty backup tight end were just as great as landing a superstar, and it would be effectively impossible for any sane person to collect a complete set, because even if you had the outlandish luck of never finding a duplicate, you'd still need to buy about two hundred packs of something that carried a price of about three bucks a pack. But the biggest reason these were fucking retarded was simple: They were fucking-ass poker chips. They were thick pieces of plastic packed in with thin pieces of cardboard. They made round indentations on whichever card was unfortunate enough to be directly underneath them in a pack, and they did the same to any other card they were around if you bothered to integrate them into your collection in any meaningful way. And you can't throw them away, because they're worth like seventy-five cents, and just having one means you're a dork who can't bear to throw something away that's "collectible" anyway. Chip Shots ruined my life, and if they had been around when I was younger, I'm certain that they would have raped my childhood.

I'll think of more of these eventually. Pacific existed as a company for more than a decade, so I've got plenty of material to work with.