A Year of Topps Designs: 1986

Perhaps sensing greater competition in the trading card market, Topps put a lot of work into their sports designs in 1986.

The baseball set uses a black top border, a design Topps rarely used in any sports sets. It's thought of as one of the very few black bordered baseball sets, along with 1971 and 2007. Funny thing is, about 3/4 of the border is white, but the top is where the eye goes.

Meanwhile, Topps put out maybe it's best ever football design in 1986, with the football field background. In 1986 I started collecting, buying packs of baseball stickers and football cards, so this was the first sports set I ever collected, and I am very fond of it to this day.

The hockey set has a rather intricate border, giving off a 3-D effect. It's a bit busy but it looks interesting.

On the non-sports side, Topps was mostly focused on churning out more series of the surprise 1985 hit Garbage Pail Kids. (I collected those too. Unfortunately my method of collecting was to peel off the stickers and stick them to my bedroom wall, so they're all long gone.) Topps decided to lean into the rudeness a little more with the Snotty Signs set. These were filled with nasty insults - three stickers to a card, including one personalized to a common boys or girls name of the era. Unlike Garbage Pail Kids there is no real attempt at humor, these are straight-up mean insults.

Speaking of harsh insults,  here's Howard the Duck!

Probably the only Topps set that had a cigar as a major design element. There were some years where Topps's non-sport sets were filled with blockbuster after blockbuster. This wasn't one of them. Their other offerings that year were sticker sets. One was Little Shop of Horrors. The backs of the stickers all featured cards of the characters singing.

Their other sticker set capitalized on the brief-but-intense Max Headroom fad. The stickers have card backs with several different designs. I liked this one.