Part of the joy of collecting trading cards comes from the storytelling on the back. While the 8.75 square inches on the back of a trading card isn’t that much real estate to tell a detailed story – or even your version of The Aristocrats joke – in the hands of a true artist, it might as well be the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Consider the following, very impressive archive of the Complete Visual History of Topps Baseball Card Backs. You can see the amount of time, thought, and effort that went into the backs of cards – perhaps even more than the front! We’re talking about fun little hand-drawn characters, cartoon strips, interesting personal tidbits about the players, and so on.
Cards were also early vehicles for the genre we now call “data storytelling”. With their cozy tables and headline stats, the back of each card told a story with data. For those of us over 40, cards used to be the only analytics game in town. If you wanted to know a player’s stats, you had to collect their cards.
For our first ghostwrite blind box, we wanted to continue this great tradition, and also take it up a notch. What if we enlisted a world-class journalist to write the stories? What if we applied the tools of data visualization to something as dry and boring as the set odds? Well, here’s what that would look like:
SHEA SERRANO
Shea Serrano has published four full length books: The Rap Yearbook (2015), Basketball (and Other Things) (2017), and Movies (and Other Things) (2019) and Hip Hop and Other Things (2021). ALL FOUR were New York Times best-sellers. Shea is to publishing what Sabrina Ionescu is to free throws: he does not miss.
Shea’s work has always lived at the intersection of writing, culture, and design. His books combine sparkling prose with illustrations and graphics – a synthesis of literature, art, and internet culture. As a brand, we owe a lot to Shea’s influence. ghosts stand on his shoulders.
Our WNBA “Game Face” Blind Box collection tells the story of the 2024 season, and Shea helps us tell it. He wrote a profile of every player in the set, and his words appear online everywhere that the ghosts do – from our auction page to our digital archive to our social media. They even make an appearance on the packaging itself. So when you see our WNBA ghosts on the internet – or in a box – we hope that Shea’s words will be on your mind as you remember these players and this season.
KIRK GOLDSBERRY
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kirk Goldsberry changed the way we think about basketball statistics. For almost a century, the fingerprint of every player was the box score. Then Kirk came along and gave us a new one: the shot chart.
If you’ve ever read ESPN or The Ringer, you’ve probably seen Kirk’s shot charts. If you’ve ever spent any time on NBA Twitter, you’ve probably seen Kirk’s shot charts. And if you ever worked for the San Antonio Spurs, where he ran their analytics department, you’ve probably seen Kirk’s shot charts.
Now, Kirk Goldsberry is bringing his talents to ghostwrite. For the Blind Box packaging, he created this custom visualization to explain the odds of pulling different chase ghosts:
And he’ll be contributing to our data-storytelling efforts in digital form, too.
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Did we achieve our goal of leveling-up the storytelling? If anything, we might have overshot the mark. What are we supposed to do for our next release? Resurrect the spirit of Ernest Hemmingway and have him write the profiles? Is there a Nobel prize winner for chart-making? We already have the best of the best.
But hey, there are worse problems to have.
ghostwrite 