What If ...
Board Buzz: Must-read threads on Blowout Forums (Nov. 16)
What's Buzzing: The Paul Skenes variation Topps should have made -- along with other what-if cards -- plus Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul, chasing Caitlin Clark Rookie Cards, NFL Week 11 and more in this Saturday edition.
What if ... Topps created a Stadium Club WWE card set?
What if ... Topps created a Stadium Club WWE card set?
It's a simple enough question, so that's why you see it here has both the headline and the opener -- and there are more than 100 simple fake cards that I've crafted to follow to show just some of the possibilities. It all started with a tweet of the photo you see above of Bianca Belair on the way to the ring for her history-making main-event match at WrestleMania 37 earlier this month. I saw that and followed with a tweet of my own saying "somewhere out there in the world is a Topps Stadium Club WWE set that could be huge."
For those who don't know, Stadium Club is a brand that Topps introduced to the world back in 1991 and it's a photo-driven full-bleed brand that has been seen for baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer and even some non-sports entities ... but never for WWE, which Topps has made cards for in its current run since 2005. (The first Topps WWE sets were in 1985 and 1987.)
Why might it work? Well, if you ask me, the WWE has some of the best photographers on the planet working for them and I scoured a tiny sampling of the thousands of images they produce every year to document it all -- in the ring, outside the ring and behind-the-scenes stuff -- to imagine the possibilities. Just a sliver of their work ever sees cardboard, and while a number of the iconic images you will see here have appeared on cards they've not often had much of a dynamic border-free run like you see in Stadium Club.
I spent a few hours this weekend coming up with a basic photo frame for some imagined -- totally fake -- cards to help sell the idea like I'm D-Generation X with a new T-shirts to hock. Here's hoping you see what I see for the potential as I look at a few categories of photos and approaches I'd take in an all-eras, all-encompassing set that seems like it could easily be one of the coolest and meatiest card sets in WWE history if it were to happen.
What If ... The Rock had new Miami football cards from Panini?
The card you see above doesn't exist ... but what if it did?
Buzz has been wondering for some time now what kind of demand there might be if one of the biggest names in the world could be found in new packs of football cards. Armed with Photoshop, Buzz chose 2018 Panini Contenders Draft Picks, a set that includes stars from the past as well as new pros, to present the question.
Everywhere you look, it seems that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is there -- Apple and Ford commercials, countless blockbuster movies, Ballers on the small screen, on Under Armour shoes and clothing, as People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" ... we could go on and on here, but the point is that he's a global household name. For collectors, you'll find him on cardboard in a number of WWE sets, of course, and in a few non-sports releases, too, complete with some of his only certified autographed cards from when he was just getting his global-dominance career started.
But it all began long before that at the University of Miami -- and that's where his cardboard started, too.
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