Trading card

A trading card, also known as a collectible card, is a small card typically featuring an image of a real or fictional person, place, or thing, accompanied by a short description and other text like statistics, attacks, or trivia. Collecting them is a hobby, and some are used in games. These cards have often been included with retail products such as cigarettes, bubblegum, and tea packs. Multiple cards in the same series are usually released, allowing collectors to trade and assemble complete sets.

Origins

While strongly linked to sports, like baseball cards, they also cover topics like cartoons, comic book characters, TV shows, and movie stills. In the 1990s, cards made specifically for gameplay grew popular enough to form a distinct category known as collectible card games. The history of trading cards begins with trade cards, the ancestors of cigarette and food cards. Early prizes found in retail products were cigarette cards, originally designed as stiffeners for paper cigarette packs and to advertise products.

Allen and Ginter in the U.S. in 1886, and British company W.D. & H.O. Wills in 1888, were the first tobacco companies to print advertisements. Soon after, lithograph pictures on the cards covered encyclopedic topics from nature to war to sports, appealing to male smokers. By 1900, hundreds of companies had produced thousands of tobacco card sets.

Children would ask cigarette buyers for the promotional cards. Following this success, manufacturers of other products included trade cards in their goods or handed them to customers. World War II ended cigarette card production due to paper shortages, and they never fully returned. After the war, collectors in the UK focused on tea cards, while those in the US collected bubble gum cards.

Early baseball cards

The first baseball cards were trade cards from a sporting goods company in the late 1860s, around baseball’s professionalization. Early 20th-century baseball cards appeared in candy and tobacco products, including the famous T206 set distributed by the American Tobacco Company in 1909, which contains the most valuable card ever printed, featuring Honus Wagner. In 1933, the Goudey Gum Company issued baseball cards with player biographies on the backs, the first to put them in bubble gum. Bowman Gum issued its first baseball cards in 1948.