Tuesday, March 1, 2016

1971 Topps Greatest Moments Confusion

I just came across an auction that ended on ebay for what was listed as a 1971 Topps Greatest Moments card I had never seen before:  a Baseball Coin Rub Game card:


I have never read anything about the Greatest Moments cards coming with a Coin Rub Game card, but this sure looks like it would have come with this set.  Here is the picture from the auction, which included the Sal Bando card as well:



The cards are the same size with black borders.  The winning bid for this auction was $1,275, so that should give an idea of how rare this card is.

Here is a look at the back.   



It does have a similar color scheme as the back of the Greatest Moments cards, but does have a different card stock:


Information on how this set was distributed is very limited. Fortunately a wrapper has surfaced, and recently sold at auction for $3,287.

However, the wrapper does not mention a game card


 nor does the box:


However, in searching for images of Topps coin rub cards, I came across this picture:


This picture comes from an post from The Topps Archives about the Topps Action Emblems from 1973 - 1974.  The wrapper for this test set does mention a baseball rub off game card in each pack, and the size of the wrapper does seem to match the size of the game card:



So with a little research, it turns out that the game card actually was part of the Action Emblems test, not the Greatest Moments set.  I just hope the winning bidder realized that they were buying a test card from the Action Emblems test, and didn't think they were picking up a previously unknown Greatest Moments card.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Card stock of the coin rub card is identical, I won the lot.

However, the copyright is different with an * designating a side A of a sheet where the players have no * and all were probably on 1 sheet.

Dan