Error Card

In the trading card collecting hobby, an error card is a card that shows incorrect information or some other unintended flaw. It can contain a mistake, such as a misspelling or a photo of someone other than the athlete named on the card. Depending on whether the manufacturer noticed the problem while the cards were still being produced, a card may exist in both correct and incorrect versions. If the correction is made sufficiently early in the print run, the error card may be significantly rarer and more valuable than the corrected version. However, the opposite may be true if the error is corrected late in the printing cycle, resulting in a smaller population of the corrected version of the card compared to the error version.

If the manufacturer never made a correction, the card is considered an "uncorrected error". Often, however, "error card" is used in a more limited sense, meaning only those cards where variant versions exist.

One example of "variations" happened in the 1959 and 1960 Topps baseball sets. Certain cards were printed on two different types of cardstock; one produced a white back, and the other a darker gray. The photographs and information on the cards themselves were not in error. The result was that said cards occur in two variations, based on the back color.