Trading Cards Go Digital

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Pictures that come alive and talk aren’t just for Harry Potter and his Hogwarts pals, but could be coming soon to a box of baseball cards stuffed under a bed near you.

Make that basketball or football cards.

Two major American trading card companies have created video trading cards — standard looking, but with technology that allows athletes to come to life in a collector’s hand.

“We’re real excited about it,” Panini America representative Scott Prusha said of the Panini HRX, to be launched in mid-June with cards for four NBA players.

“I think it’s very cool,” said Glen Humenik, manager of Legends of the Game on King St. W., although he has yet to see one for himself. “You can argue different ways if it’s a card or not. I think it’s cool as an insert (into a pack of standard trading cards).”

The Panini HRX cards are about the size of a regular playing card — six by eight centimetres — but thicker, at about half a centimetre. Each one has a “play” button on the front that starts a reel of about 30 minutes of high-definition game and behind-the-scenes video. They’ll be available in packs of basketball cards put out by Panini called “Totally Certified” packs, which retail at $20 U.S.

Not every pack will include a video card, so as with a coveted rookie card or autographed card, collectors won’t know what their pack contains and may have to trade for a video card if they don’t find one, which Prusha said makes the HRX like any other trading card.

“They become more collectible that way,” he said.

The video cards are athlete-specific, not one device that gets loaded up with different players’ videos like an e-reader. They are rechargeable via a USB port.

Upper Deck, another major American trading card company, released Evolution video cards in April, featuring NFL players Adrian Peterson (Minnesota Vikings), Tony Romo (Dallas Cowboys), DeSean Jackson (Philadelphia Eagles), and Patrick Willis (San Francisco 49ers). The Upper Deck cards are the same dimensions as the Panini product, but come in a booklet format and play only 60 seconds of video.

Panini will produce 204 cards in its first round of production; 51 for each of Blake Griffin (L.A .Clippers), Kobe Bryant (L.A. Lakers), John Wall (Washington Wizards) and Kevin Durant (Oklahoma City Thunder).

Next to come is football, with Cam Newton (the Carolina Panthers’ first-round draft pick) and Mark Ingram (New Orleans Saints) as two of the first players to be featured in Panini’s NFL video cards. Prusha said hockey cards aren’t far behind.

“We definitely will be doing this in the NHL very soon,” he said.

The 2011 Upper Deck Football packs, which contained the Evolution video cards, sold very well, Humenik said between serving customers at the 20-year-old sports memorabilia store. But he’d like to see hockey players included in the video technology and have every box of cards eventually come with a video card.

Cards are sold in packs and the packs in boxes. Panini Totally Certified Basketball, for example, come in packs of five cards. Each box contains six packs, or 30 cards. Currently, not every box is guaranteed to have a video card.

Video cards come on the heels of some other wacky developments, including oversized “entomology cards” containing real bugs, booklet cards with autographs on one side and scraps of sweaty jersey on the other, and historical cards with hair from Abraham Lincoln.

“What’s left (to invent)? I don’t know what’s left,” mused Humenik.