I happened across this card today and thought I'd share a story with the Just About community. First, a tiny bit of context and background. Back in the early nineties Marvel/Fleer Entertainment became a client of mine and the studio I worked for in Philadelphia at the time. Unknown to me this time-period would become known as the golden age of card collecting and lead to some truly epic creations. For me personally the highlight would be the creation of what became the Marvel OverPower card game.

Along the way however I was involved with a series of cards printed on metallic papers that started with Marvel Metal and expanded into other genres including the NFL, NHL, and others. During the 1995 NY ComicCon we wanted to promote the NFL version with a huge trade show presence. One of my promotional ideas was to create actual metal stamped promo cards to hand out to fans as they entered the convention. As you can imagine, these were not easy to find a supplier for (this was before the Internet). But eventually we found someone willing to do it. The only snag was simple, they wouldn't be able to deliver the final product until the day of the event.

I remember the boxes being extremely heavy and we decided against handing them out at the door and instead handing them out at the booth. We handed out about a box and half full when the alarms started sounding in the form of angry parents and scared young people with bloody fingers. In our rush the real metal cards, which had only just arrived, had not been sanded on the edges. The edges are rather raw and, well, sharp. Little freaking knives that we had just handed out to hundreds of young children!

Needless to say we stopped. And we did our best to confiscate those that had been handed out. We offered free products to those who returned them and eventually we did manage to get almost all of them back. I suspect, like me, many realized the collecting opportunity and hung onto them. Although I doubt many kept theirs for the past thirty years.

It was a hard lesson. But one I will never forget.

What lessons have you learned in your career that you will never forget?