Non Sport Trading Cards

Although non sport trading cards do not have the hype of sports cards, what they lack in mainstream appeal, the make up for in ingenuity. non sports trading cards of every conceivable description have been around for pretty much as long as kids have been card trading. When I was a teenager, I actually first learned about the Iran-Contra scandal through a set of Iran-Contra trading cards. There was a small, locally-owned bookstore nearby that had many creative things like that. They covered political scandals, periods of history, famous wars, and any other topic of historical interest.

Of course, my favorite non sport trading cards when I was growing up were magic cards. I loved playing Magic the Gathering with my friends. I didn't really have the money to invest in a full, comprehensive set of magic trading cards, but for a while I had a pretty competitive deck building. Kids were crazy about those non sports trading cards back when I was in school. They actually had to ban them at one point because we kept pulling them out in the middle class and wanting to trade with each other. There were occasional arguments about it when one kid got stuck with a bad trade that he shouldn't have made.

The surprising thing is, as video games have taken off, non sport trading cards haven't waned. If anything, they have become even more popular than before. I had some friends when I lived in Oakland who used to play what they would call nerd cards. It was actually a card-based role-playing game involving superheroes. They had cards for pretty much all of the major superheroes in the Marvel universe, and would battle it out, sometimes using three or four teams at the same time.

You would get bonuses for having all of your cards from the same group, or from compatible decks. It was pretty complex, and it was utterly beyond my own degree of interest as a collector, but I was glad that they had the cards. Although I probably never would get into collecting them myself, I definitely enjoyed playing the game with those people.

The great thing about non sport trading cards is you can always do something with them. Sports cards are okay if you are a big fan of the sport, but they don't really lend themselves to any particular game. You can't have your batter fight it out with someone else's pitcher, for example. It just doesn't work that way with sports cards. With the non sport trading cards that I had, however, you could learn about history, play make-believe superhero games, or have fierce battles between warriors.