Trading card

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Trading-cards.jpg A trading card (or collectible card) is a small card which is intended for trading and collecting. Trading cards are traditionally associated with sports; baseball cards are especially well-known. Cards dealing with other subjects are often considered a separate category from sports cards, known as editorial trading cards or simply non-sports trading cards. These often feature cartoons, comic book characters, or television series.

As with playing cards, which they generally resemble, trading cards may sometimes be used to play various games. In the 1990s, cards designed specifically for playing games became popular enough to develop into a distinct category of collectible card games. These tend to use either fantasy subjects or sports as the basis for gameplay.

The development of the Internet has brought the development of various online communities through which members could trade cards with each other. One of the earliest of these was Old Baseball Cards, a group originally organized on Prodigy.

The value of trading cards depends on a combination of the subject's popularity and the scarcity of the cards themselves. In some cases, especially with older cards before the advent of card collecting as a widespread hobby, they have become collector's items of considerable value. In more recent years, cards have not necessarily appreciated as much in value due to mass production, although some manufacturers have used limited editions and smaller print runs to boost value.

In some jurisdictions, trading cards (particularly baseball cards) are distributed by police officers to children in order to boost public relations.