91PORNY

What do Leave It to Beaver, monster trucks, and the Gulf War have in common? They were all made into trading cards. As a '90s kid, I remember getting lost at the trading card aisle behind one of the checkout lines at Walmart and marveling at the wonderfully strange subjects for sale. You can find countless weird vintage trading cards online, but these are the ones you have to see to believe.

Mel Appel’s Weird Ball trading cards from the ‘80s were made in the Garbage Pail Kids mold — full of off-color humor and stomach-rolling illustrations. These parody cards were just one of the many that came out in the late '80s, though they never quite reached the level of success that other brands did.

While not strictly trading cards, these joke cards and stickers are too on-brand not to make our list. From fake credit card vouchers to broken cigarette stub stickers, Nasty Tricks packs would probably still tickle kids pink today.

Piranha Enterprises is behind another late '80s gem, the Killer Cards series. Remember the cable show 1000 Ways to Die? These cards were the 2-D predecessors to their death-inducing scenes. Think of being drained by a vampire or attacked by a shark. Despite the violent premise, these cards don’t quite dip into the rated-R territory we've seen that the trading card world has to offer. 

When you hear the name Topps, baseball cards probably come to mind. But the Topps Company used to have quite a robust portfolio. One of the silly standouts is their Creature Feature line of “You’ll Die Laughing” cards. Classic monsters from cinema graced the covers of these cards with pithy sayings underneath, like, “Like my new nail polish.”

Related: 11 Most Valuable Garbage Pail Kids Cards for Collectors & Sellers

Don’t let the modern panic around the rise of true crime media fool you — this phenomenon is way older than you think. Before people were queuing up true crime podcasts, they were thumbing through the pages of True Detective or collecting True Crime I & II trading cards.

Featuring portraits of all the hard-hitting criminals you can think of and illustrations of infamous crimes, these cards weren’t (and still aren’t) for the faint of heart.

You can’t have a list inspired by trading cards from the '80s and '90s without including the iconic Topps sets of Goosebumps collectible cards. R.L. Stine’s horror media franchise had quite the chokehold on us ‘90s kids, and these cards were just some of the oddball merch we collected.

MAD Magazine walked so The Onion could run. They were such a beloved operation that they released a ton of trading cards in the 1990s based on their iconic illustrative covers.

Where kids today have their favorite superheroes or YouTubers, yesteryear’s youngsters had their favorite pro wrestlers and monster trucks. Whether the iconic Grave Digger or lesser-known teeth-tearing trucks, Classic’s Monster Trucks collectible cards had them all.

Related: 11 Most Valuable Marvel Trading Cards for Comic Lovers

Discovering that Desert Storm trading cards were a thing in the ‘90s wasn’t on our 2025 bingo card, but here we are. Topps has made an appearance several times on this list, and their interesting catalog just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Given the strange subject matter for something as kitschy as a trading card, we’re not surprised these have been lost to time.

Of all the vintage trading cards we’ve unearthed, this set has to top the list for being the most unexpected. These AAA Sports political trading cards were made for the Clinton vs. Bush vs. Perot presidential race. While the cards themselves are rather milquetoast in comparison to others on this list, they’re about as oddball as you can get.

Sports might have put trading cards on the map, but these wacky cards from decades past are the ones we can’t stop thinking about. Did some of your childhood favorites make our list?