NERD ALERT, Y'ALL:
I collect the HELL out of some trading cards. Trading cards are super fun. And, here's the thing: I don't even like sports. I don't collect "sports" trading cards. I couldn't care less about the Kobes and Jordans.
I collect Garbage Pail Kids, Marvel, and The Muppets.
But this isn't a Garbage Pail Kids, Marvel and The Muppets blog. No. That would be an amazing blog, for sure. But this? This is a wrestling blog. And I just so happen to also collect wrestling cards.
Over on Xitter, there's a little thing called #wrestlingcardwednesday, where people show off a wrestling card from their collection. If I scheduled this article to come out correctly, it should be Wednesday now, so let us dive in to a listicle of my list of top ten wrestling cards I own.
It has been a minute since we've seen any consequential power of positivity. But, when my wife and I started watching wrestling again just before the pandemic (I had been a fan during the Attitude Era, she rarely watched before then), The New Day was something that we latched onto right away.
Masculinity isn't just meaty men slapping meat. It's also being secure in who you are and a balance of fun and business. The New Day, in their heyday, embodied that energy.
I trade quite frequently in the wrestling card world, so I have forgotten who traded me this. But, I remember that it was someone who knew I was a New Day fan and wanted to hook me up, because they took WAY LESS in $$$ value for this card (and it was their idea).
I also own all three of their rookies and a handful of random numbered things that are also cool. But, if I were going to pick one New Day card I own to showcase here, it has to be this /10. For those uninitiated, that's the back half of the serial number. So, /10 means there were only 10 made. And 02/10 means that this was the second one of these Gold Flash Prizms made.
Growing up watching Attitude Era wrestling, you KNOW this young comic book nerd loved it when they mixed super heroes with wrestling.
They never did that better than with The Hurricane. Dude was NEXT LEVEL. Beat The Rock in his heyday. You can't say that.
Wrestling mat relics are pretty much what they sound like: A piece of the mat from a specific event shoved into a trading card.
The Hurricane mat relic is from the 2002 Royal Rumble. The bit of canvas in the card has a green stain on it. Given that the picture has The Hurricane chokeslamming Tajiri, who is known for spitting a green mist, I'm assuming that green stain is Tajiri spit.
Spit on a regular trading card and hand it to me, I'll look at you like the butthole you are. Give me a card that contains someone's spit? Yeah, sure. I'm about that. Explain it? No.
Foley is God.
Through all of time and history, Mankind 99-2000 is easily my favorite wrestler/wrestling character of all time.
However, my Foley collection is...okay. I don't have anything really cool looking, or anything that is widely considered "valuable."
I do, however, have the rookie card for the sock he keeps in his crotch before shoving it in a person's mouth.
Also, you won't find a lot of shiny cards in my collection. There's a non-shiny version of this that I wanted more, but it wasn't where I was at the time I bought this. The Chromium one was. So, I bought the Chromium one.
These 1991 Merlin cards didn't have a wide American release. It's my understanding that they come in one of three languages: Italian, German, and British, which is kind of different than American English.
This particular card is in Italian. Many people in the card trading community refer to the 1991 Merlin Andre the Giant cards as "Mafia Andre," given how he looks like a Miami mob enforcer.
I am such a huge fan of Andre the Giant, but this image reminds me more than any other card of The Princess Bride. Like, it looks like a card for an actor not a wrestler.
By the time I started watching wrestling, I just knew Terry Funk as the crazy guy who kept telling Mick Foley to do dangerous stuff. However, when you look even a little into wrestling history, you see that Terry Funk might be more important to the sport than Ric Flair.
This card is from one of his many tours doing the craziest stuff you ever did see over in Japan. The back has a score card that has not been filled in. Plus, the person who traded me for it said it was a Pop One, which only means it's the only one graded, not anything else important.
What's a graded card, you might ask? A company, in this case SGC, gets a card from a collector. They look it over with a fine-toothed comb and decide how flawless the card is on a 1-10 scale. Then, they seal the card in a plastic, air-tight case that displays that number. It's a great way for collectors to feel like Jabba The Hut.
In a past article, I talked about how much I love the antics of Brian Christopher and Scott Taylor. They were, for a lack of a better term, Too Cool.
The Kofi card in the number ten spot is called "Gold Flash," but I bet you can assume there's no real gold in it. This card, however, was put out the Danbury Mint, official gold plater of everything since 1-800 numbers began.
This is not only one of my favorite cards that I own, it's also probably one of the dumbest cards I own. Why gold plate a card? Why gold plate THIS card? It's so stupid, I love it.
This is the second mat relic to make it to the collection. The view in the card in the picture is from the front, and this set puts the relic in the back. It's not surprising that I have more than one mat relic, as I used to be known on the internet as "Mr. Mat Relic."
I had a misguided attempt to collect an entire WWE wrestling ring in mat relics. I collected around 600 square inches out of 57,600 before I quit. This was one of the last cards I got, and one of the reasons I stopped.
I was collecting mat relics mostly as a publicity stunt, not because of how much I loved them. Once I got this relic, which was from the 1999 SummerSlam (specifically the Kiss My Ass Match), I realized this was the only relic of a show I actually watched and cared about, so why keep getting stuff I don't care about?
Bonus info: This was the first mat relic trading card that was ever produced.
I'm an idiot for Elias's little brother. If that storyline had happened at any other time in the history of wrestling, it might be one of the dumbest things you've ever seen. But, it happened in a real creative drought for WWE, and Elias grabbed that turd of an idea and shined it up real nice.
For those not familiar, Elias was a bearded wrestler that people didn't like. Suddenly, he disappeared, then reappeared without a beard, claiming to be his own little brother, Ezekiel.
It was hilarious. I collect Zeke autos. I chose this one largely because it's not shiny. Most of the Zeke cards in existence are shiny.
ahem BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
God, I love that. It's so much fun! That kid is a punk in the best way.
I first heard that some of the cards from the 2023 Panini Revolution WWE set had gotten into packs without the foil when someone posted a Paul Bearer they pulled on Xitter.
I am a sucker for certain error cards. So, I ran to eBay, and this Dirty Dom was the only one on sale. For only a few dollars. Cha-ching.
And this particular error makes this card more like art. Basically, they forgot to put the foil layer on that has Dominik Mysterio's name and the name of the set.
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