When you open a pack of baseball cards you can usually be certain of what you’ll find inside: baseball cards. But with Topps’ annual Allen & Ginter set, you might also find a card featuring a piece of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries’ wedding menu in it. Or one autographed by the Invisible Man. Or an Egg card.
It is arguably the most imaginative and fun major sports(ish) trading card release each year, and the 2024 edition is no different. Yes, it includes hundreds of cards depicting baseball stars past and present (from Paul Skenes to Babe Ruth as a member of the Boston Red Sox), plus big names from a variety of other sports, like Jayden Daniels and Katie Ledecky, but there’s also a mix of celebrities, entertainers and also journalists — like The Athletic’s own Dianna Russini, who has base cards, autographed cards and relic cards in the set.
“The Allen and Ginter set is from the late 1800s,” says Topps senior vice president of product, Clay Luraschi. “What it did was it paid tribute to the world’s champions. The original set had a group of baseball players in there, boxers, weightlifters, etc. (Ed. note: There was also a “World’s Dudes” set.) And we were inspired by that because we thought it was really unique. It also had a really interesting design. It was back in the late 1800s when they were making tobacco cards. This was one of the sets that people considered to be an important piece in trading card history. So in 2006, (Topps) picked up the brand and started releasing the products under the name.
“It’s, to a certain extent, anything goes. It’s the best brainstorm of the year. If you look at the original Allen & Ginter cards and you look at the cards from the turn of the century and you look at the old tobacco cards, the subject matter went across the spectrum. They went from pets, buildings, anything you can think of.”
The 2024 set is certainly keeping with that spirit — particularly the pets part. For the first time this year, Allen & Ginter features past winners of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
“I got a letter from a Westminster fan that enclosed a collectible dog card in a plastic envelope with a request for me to autograph it,” says Don Sturz, president of the Westminster Kennel Club. “And so, I went out to (our) staff and said, ‘Okay I don’t want to ruin this person’s card, do I sign on the front, do I sign on the back?’ I just want to be sure I’m right, and they’re like, ‘Oh you sign on the front.’ And I’m looking at it and I’m like, why don’t we have these? Why aren’t there Westminster dogs on a card? So we reached out to Topps to see if that might be something they’d be interested in.”
“As soon as that email came through I said, ‘Oh I know the exact product that I’d like to feature the Westminster program in,’” says Luraschi.
The Westminster inserts include base cards of 40 dogs with odds of one appearing in every four packs, on average. There are also far more limited variations that include a piece of an official Best in Show ribbon in the card. Then there are also one-of-a-kind cards of seven dogs that include a piece of a purple handler’s ribbon.
“The Best in Show rosette is one from our archives,” Sturz says. “I love Westminster and I would want to do everything I could for Westminster, but if I won Best in Show and had that rosette, nobody’s touching that with a scissor. We took from our own archive, our Best in Show rosette that we had on display in the office, which even for us was, oh my God it almost seemed sacrilegious to do that. We figured let’s go all in on this.
“The purple ribbons are actually ribbons that were worn by the dog handlers at the dog show in honor of the Purple Leash Project, which is a charitable endeavor that we partner with Purina Pro Plan on and it donates money to create pet friendly shelters for individuals coming out of abusive situations. So often people are in very unhealthy, dangerous situations but they can’t leave because they don’t want to leave their pet, because most shelters won’t take people with dogs or cats or any kind of pets.”
As for how they picked the dogs and the photos included in the set, Sturz says quite a bit of curation went into both:
“It spans a number of years. We try to pick an array of dogs. We also try to zero in on particular Best in Show winners that develop their own fandom and people came to know them by their call name, like Uno the Beagle, Buddy Holly and Trumpet the Bloodhound. We try to pick dogs that not only are they champions but they develop their own fan base because of their appeal. The photos that were shared were not the posed formal show photos, they were candid photos that tried to capture the character and the personality of each of the dogs. … We also have Tommy Valor in there. He is a service dog that Westminster sponsored his training, and so we included him, just to kind of give a sense of a well-rounded picture of what Westminster does and how we celebrate dogs.”
So will this be a one-off? “I definitely hope that this is well-received and that there’s an interest in going forward,” Sturz says. “We would love for this to continue and see what we can do with this.”
But there are so many other unique elements in this set beyond the Westminster cards. Here are some of our other favorites (see the full checklist PDF here):
Dinosaur DNA relics
A museum INSIDE of a trading card 🤯🦕
These dinosaur fossils are some of the oldest relics ever used in a trading card. Chase these cards in 2024 Ginter, releasing 10/30.
Which other “oddball” relic cards would you like to see in the future? 🤔👇 pic.twitter.com/39GAIMR9ZP
— Topps (@Topps) October 22, 2024
What other trading card set gives you the chance to start your own real-life Jurassic Park? There are really slim odds on pulling one of these dino fossil cards out of a pack (full odds PDF here), but this is about as cool of a relic out there.
Got the Itch
“We all had scratch and sniff stickers as kids right? That’s where that came from,” says Luraschi of the “Got the Itch” inserts, which feature a variety of scents from auto leather to cinnamon bun and appear at a rate of 1:52 packs. “We thought it would be cool with cards. I mean, we’ve just done some really interesting things with cards and sometimes there are things that we’ll produce that you may think, oh we’re just doing this for fun, but it’s actually, we’re testing the market. Allen and Ginter is a great place to test new things.”
X-RAY’D
This is another experimental format appearing this year — X-ray images of different animals appearing at a rate of 1:7 packs. Yeah, it’s weird, but it’s way more interesting than a card of a middle reliever.
Amelia Earhart signature
Each year, Ginter includes a set of historical autographs cut from original artifacts and documents and put into one-of-a-kind cards. This year’s set includes signatures from the likes of Amelia Earhart, Frederick Douglass and John Quincy Adams. These will be the toughest pulls in the product, but they’re out there, adding another surreal element to the set.
Ballpark Bites
The Ballpark Bites insert set seems like fertile meme card territory. Is this a Chicken Tenders rookie card? Don’t be shocked if a PSA 10 Chicken Tenders card sells for hundreds of dollars at some point.
Buzzin
Yep, Ginter even has bee and wasp cards. Sadly, no stinger relics though.
Again, Allen & Ginter also has plenty of cards, autographs and relics of actual baseball players and other athletes, but you can find those in any sports card set. Part of the fun of opening packs of trading cards is the surprise of what’s inside and we enjoy this set because it widens those possibilities in unusual ways.
Let us know your favorite off-beat trading card in the comments.
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(All images: Topps)
