Lacrosse Card Landscape: Individual Player Collections

Collecting trading cards was a fairly simple hobby for many decades. Cards were basic and building a set (defined as one of each card from a particular year and release) was a standard practice. Some collectors may have focused primarily on their favourite teams, but player collecting really wasn’t a factor because most athletes did not have an abundance of different cards in the early years.

As the hobby increased in popularity, standard card releases began to change. Inserts (non-base and non-parallel cards included in a set) had been around for years, but had always been secondary to the regular issue set. But by the late 1980s/early 1990s, many athletes in baseball, football, basketball and hockey were the subject of so many different cards (base, insert and specialty issues) that hobbyists could legitimately focus their entire collections on certain individuals and have plenty of cards to keep them satisfied.

Individual player collecting has continued to grow as the hobby has expanded in recent decades. Limited edition insert and parallel cards are now the main chase for the majority of collectors who now see base cards, once the only trading card option, as undesirable bulk.

Lacrosse was late to incorporate this modern card framework into their already sporadic issues. Beginning with Upper Deck in the early 2010s and then continuing with Parkside, Topps and now PLL Collectibles, collectors of the fastest game on two feet have had the opportunity to focus their hobby goals on only a few players and still face significant challenges. Serial-numbered inserts and parallels, some including autographs and/or memorabilia pieces, can be exceptionally difficult to find and come with corresponding price tags on the secondary market.

And while longtime collectors are still occasionally heard glorifying the hobby’s simplicity in the “good old days,” there is no arguing that more and increasingly rare cards offer greater degrees of challenge, more acquisitions to celebrate and contribute greatly to general hobby interest.

Now that lacrosse enthusiasts have significantly more cards to collect, the challenge is knowing exactly what has been produced for their favourite players. There are plenty of hobby resources for traditional hobby sports, but lacrosse isn’t quite as fortunate. However, the Lax Card Archive, the hobby’s most thorough resource for lacrosse card information, has a Player Collections section that accounts for all team, league and company issues, base cards, inserts and parallels. Print counts are also listed when the information is available, so collectors can properly estimate the challenge inherent in finding a particular card. The resulting lists detail every known card for more than 300 current and former players; men and women in field and box lacrosse.

While some great players such as Jake Bergey are victims of their era resulting in just a couple of cards to their names, others like Charlotte North, Lyle Thompson, Rob Pannell and Trevor Baptiste have dozens of cards each. Paul Rabil currently tops the charts with 96 different cards.

Lacrosse still ranks far behind other sports in the number of trading cards produced. The greatest number of individual cards a player can have in the 2023 PLL Snapshot set is 11 (Base, Gold 1/1, Red /10, Black /25, Blue /77, Base Auto, Gold Auto 1/1, Red Auto /10, Black Auto /25, Yellow Auto /49 & Blue Auto /99). Meanwhile, multiple thousands of unique cards are produced annually for contemporary baseball, football, basketball and hockey stars. Lacrosse card production will undoubtedly grow as the sport continues to attract new followers, but fortunately for collectors with a completionist mentality, it will be many, many years if ever before lacrosse cards catch up to the quantities issued for those other sports.

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