Somewhere in my parent’s garage, probably in the bottom of a cardboard box filled with unused Christmas decorations, remains the remnants of my basketball card collection. If memory serves I have Shaquille O’Neal and Grant Hill rookie cards among the sea of flotsam. I can remember bugging my older brother to look up their value in Beckett, and getting real excited when they were over $10. I figured that if I held onto them, they were destined to be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
And maybe they are: I have no clue. When was the last time you thought about trading cards? Was it even in the 2000s (note: I refuse to call it the “aughts”). It’s a dead medium.
The best part about the death of trading cards (yes contrarian internet poster that knows how to use Google and can find websites where people talk about trading cards in real time, trading cards are dead) is we can now apply the 2000s (see note above) favorite fetish to them: the retroization of everything! There are a couple of people out there doing retro trading cards, so I’ll seperate my favorites into two categories: realistic and fantastical.
Favorite Realistic Trading Cards
One of the things I didn’t real like about trading cards was all the shit happening on them. I mean, cool picture of Antoine Carr and all, but what the hell is that background and why are all of those bubbles on it? In an ongoing project, Reddit user skeletonpirate has created custom card sets for the Thunder, Celtics, Cavaliers and Raptors. I love the color-coordinated borders on the left side of the cards, and large amount of space devoted to (mostly) game photos of the players. Just what I want (if I wanted) in a trading card.
Favorite Fantastical Trading Cards
Have you ever wondered what players would look like if they they were drawn taking their nickname literally? No? Well Jesse Hora has, and produced wonderfully bizarre cards for the Durantula, Penny Hardaway, The Dream and Lightning Bolt. I especially love the interpretation of Clyde Drexler as a paper airplane. If I could buy these as prints I would.