There has been many companies over the years that have attempted to be part of the sports cards market. Among my favorites is Wild Card that made several series of cards from 1991-93 including NFL, NCAA football, NCAA basketball and even a political series. Wild Card's main mark on the hobby was thier exchange insert concept called stripes that could be found with a foil number in a small stripe on the bottom left of the card, these foil numbers had either 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 or 1000 and could be exchanged directly through Wild Card for that many of the regular card or a combination of stripes totalling that number. This was the first time that a company had actively tried to deal one-on-one with the collectors and to offer a way of exchanging the overproduced regular issue cards for harder to find parallel cards or exchange for a massive bulk lot of a regular or insert card. Wild Card also made redemption cards for sealed boxes and cases of thier products and these could also be found in packs. During the early 1990s Wild Card was the only packs of cards that you could pull a $3000+ card and packs were only 50 cents.

In 1993 there was a lisence disagreement between Wild Card and NFLPA about a second version of the 1993 Wild Card NFL series that was called the SuperChrome series. Wild Card said that this was a parallel version of the 1993 series, NFLPA said that it was issued seperately so it's a different product. With the problems involved with this dispute and the politics involved with obtaining sports lisences, Wild Card decided to end the sports cards business and move on to other things.

That same year Wild Card closed down and became Majestic Comics (Majestic Entertainment) and started several different series of comic books and trading cards. After only a year in the comic industry, owners of Majestic decided to part ways and the company closed.

In my opinion, Wild Card revolutionized the sports card industry with thier flashy looking inserts, stripe parallel redemption program and hands on company/collector marketing. Now days every company makes redemption cards and parallel cards, but Wild Card was the first.