Your trading cards are made by people. Your trading cards aren’t always perfect. Your trading cards are taken seriously by you — and those who make them.
But mistakes can happen.
Most collectors haven’t really thought about all the steps that go into making their trading cards — a process that takes months with many people involved in several different locations before a single pack is shredded. As cardboard has become more complicated over the years with technology and inclusions such as autographs and memorabilia, there are even more chances at errors. And with more products and more deadlines, the chances for those errors grow, too.
Every single company has had errors of some type.
The card above? It’s a 2015 Topps Triple Threads gem of Tennessee Titans QB Marcus Mariota. It’s a sweet card — a 1/1 even — and a pricey pull, but the autograph sticker is placed on the card upside down. It was pulled by group-breaker Prestige World Wide and shown off on Twitter Sunday without a mention if its extra-odd feature.
While Buzz checked eBay to see if other Mariota cards from Triple Threads had upside-down autos — there weren’t — Buzz also spotted this booklet card from the same set.
Is it an error? Probably not, but it’s definitely a card that also carries some oddity to it assuming it’s not been tampered with (not likely). It’s a card from an event-worn jersey nameplate that included an “S” — not a letter in Mariota’s name or David Cobb or Dorial Green-Beckham‘s, either. (They were the Titans’ other players at this year’s NFLPA Rookie Premiere.)
What’s most likely here is that the players’ jerseys for the Premiere said something on the back like “ROOKIES” instead of the name of the player. That’s pretty common, actually — its just not common to see those full letters make it onto cards or even to see them in photographs. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of premium interest in the card. Like the first one, the owner may not even realize it’s odd — the unusual “S” isn’t mentioned in the auction listing.
Buzz’s reaction to these might be like other collectors’ but they are also cards that seem a tad more intriguing because they shouldn’t exist that way.
Mistakes happen — but they don’t happen all that often considering the volume of cards being made these days. A couple of decades ago, we’d pay handily for rarer error cards.
These days? We’ll have to wait and see.
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