Leave it to the card companies to get into a spat about something that makes no difference WHAT-SO-EVER. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that this is the seemingly tenth time this has happened lately, and its all about being first rather than what is actually important. Card companies are actually more obsessed with being first, than being BETTER, and that is completely ass backwards. Being first means absolutely nothing, unless the quality is higher. I read in a book written by a fortune 500 CEO that customer loyalty stems just as much from quality of the product than anything. I have no freaking clue why card companies havent gottent his memo.

Here is the situation.

For 2008 Donruss Americana, Panini released cards of former US President George HW Bush on cards in their celebrity release. These cards, like just about every Panini product over the last five years was stickers on the card, and included some weird memorabilia in some cases. The design was pretty much identical to the usual Panini way of horribly producing cards, and that was that.

Here are some examples:

Panini Americana George HW Bush Auto /25

Panini Americana George HW Bush Auto /25 #2

Panini Americana George HW Bush Auto Memorabilia

Fast forward to this year’s Allen and Ginter, Topps produces on card autographs of arguably the worst president in US history, George W Bush. Regardless of his accomplishments as commander in chief, he was still a two term president, and his autographs feature a really cool picture of him throwing out a first pitch, possibly post-9/11 from early reports. Unbeknownst to the collectors buying the product, these unpublicized cards go nuts when the first ones are pulled. Topps tweets that they are the first cards of a living president in a product, and this is where things get nuts.

Here are some of the preliminary auctions for the Ginter Bush cards:

Ginter George W Bush On Card Auto

Ginter George W Bush On Card Red Ink Auto

Because Panini wanted to swing their dick around a little, they post their counter argument, basically saying the tweet was blatantly overlooking their card from 2008. They were FIRST, and that was all that mattered. Obviously, we can see how much better the Ginter versions look than their awful looking sticker shock ones from Threads, but they don’t care. Its in poor professional taste, and really shouldn’t have been done. It’s a stupid argument, especially when the Topps versions are going to be three to four times as valuable, and make Panini’s look like they were designed in a high school computer lab.

Topps was right about one thing, they did have one of the only cards signed on stock by a President, and both have cards are interesting in theory. The bottom line is that rather than fighting about whose was first, how about we fight to prove who can be better?