Sportflics Needed More than Magic (Motion) to Save Them

And just why were they sold in Upper Deck wrappers???

Jan 01, 2026

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1986 Sportflics George Brett (#1) - Card of the Day

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Happy New Year!

And, of course, welcome to the continuation of our week-long look at hobby firsts that changed the collecting world forever…in with the new!

Today (and all week, actually), we’re staying in the 1980s because, well, the 1980s ROOL!! And because the first real hobby boom happened during the 1980s, driven by — and also driving — many of the shifting sands we’re diving into this week.

So…

By 1986, the hobby had sort of settled into a frenetic but predictable rhythm.

Topps was still king of the hill for many collectors, but Fleer and Donruss had improved their products dramatically over their first five years in the baseball card business.

Fleer made a pretty big leap in 1983, what with team logos on card fronts, player pictures on card backs, and the only Ron Kittle rookie card in town.

Donruss, meanwhile, caught lightning in a mustachioed bottle when Don Mattingly turned into Lou Gehrig the exact same year that Big D made quality improvements and cut their production numbers (1984, for the record).

The 1985 collecting season had seen a huge bumper crop of rookie cards, ranging from already-arrived players like Dwight Gooden and Alvin Davis to can’t-miss or may-do-something-big guys like Eric Davis, Orel Hershiser, and the U.S. Olympic team.

Those were heady days, indeed, when you could open a 35-cent wax pack and pull a three-dollar rookie card, with enough future potential left over to make you dream about…well, about buying more cards, if you were anything like me.

The hobby was growing like never before, and grown men (and women) were spending real money on little rectangles of cardboard. And wherever there’s real money being spent, you can be sure that new ways to spend it will follow close behind.

And so it was that Major League Marketing approached Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association (i.e., “the union”) about becoming the fourth licensee to produce baseball cards featuring active MLB players.

Hoops were jumped through, moneys were exchanged, and — voilà! — we had even more reason to froth over the upcoming 1986 collecting season.

Major League Marketing wasn’t going to release just another mundane set of baseball cards, though. No way!

Instead, MLM was going to unleash the power of lenticular technology with their new line of Sportflics cards, featuring “Triple Action Magic Motion.”

The hobby press was all abuzz about the new development, and so were collectors. We couldn’t wait to get our hands on them!

That turned out to be easier said than done when the harsh realities of Sportflics distribution set in. It wasn’t so much that you couldn’t find the cards — your local card shop or show was probably flush with them. They showed up here and there at retail outlets, too.

No, the real issue with latching onto some Sportflics cards was the price — a 3-card pack would set you back 65 cents, if you could find them at MSRP. Dealers sold 200-card sets, ones they likely built by hand, for around $40.

Even for a hobby that was shedding its training wheels and talking big bucks on the regular, those were Tesla prices in a Chevy Nova world.

Still, the intrigue was high for cards that promised:

Three full-size photos on each card
Super thick, premium card stock
Tamper-proof foil wrappers
Magic Motion Baseball Stumpers
Robin Yount as a New York Yankee

OK, so Sportflics didn’t really promise the Yount-Yankees thing, but rumors of its existence as a rare proof card still whisper through hobby lore today.

The “Stumpers” were thus advertised on wrappers, referring to the two trivia cards included with the three player cards in each pack.

The three photos, of course, were key to the Magic Motion process. Each player was shown in a headshot, and then two stop-action snaps from on-field play — swinging, pitching, reloading the chaw.

When it came to execution, Sportflics delivered on most of their promises.

Each card was about three feet thick, owing to the grooved plastic used on card fronts to lenticulate, plus genuinely nice card stock. You can get an idea of all the premium goodness by looking at a card back, like George Brett’s:

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None of Topps, Fleer, or Donruss could have pulled off that gleaming white background with the stock they were using back in 1986. The equally bright colored ink makes the whole thing shine.

All in all, this card back wouldn’t look too out of place even in a super modern set. If only Sportflics had included player photos on the backs!

Well, they evidently had the same thought, because the 1987 set did include card-back pics, though tiny ones. That’s a ramble for another day, though.

Back to promises kept…

Sportflics also delivered cards in foil packs that headed off resealers at the pass. In case you don’t remember the phenomenon, some unscrupulous sorts had taken to slipping open wax packs, replacing the big rookies and stars with commons, and then resealing with a little heat.

Then they could sell the biggies as singles and the packs as packs. Double their fun and profit!

Much tougher to tamper with a pack of cards wrapped in stiff foil, and we can thank Sportflics for giving Upper Deck the idea. Of course, Topps laid out the same basic trek with their 1983 “Michigan Wrappers” made from fin-sealed cellophane/plastic done up in the same colors as their normal wax packs from that year.

Alright, with that record set straight(er), we need to address the elephant in the pack. Or is that a hippo? A rock formation? Would you believe, a speck of dust on the lens?

*shrug*

And that’s the basic problem with Sporflics cards — namely, their main attraction leaves them almost completely indecipherable and undisplayable. Three pictures of the same guy in the same space on the same card sounds space-age neato, but the execution was terrible.

Sure, you can sorta see each image, maybe even pick up a bat-flick or nose-pick here or there if you stand on one foot ten paces out from the old hickory tree and angle the card at the Legendre magic angle at high noon on the summer solstice.

But it’s short-lived, at best.

Most of the time, the front of a Sportflics card looks like the result of every grade-school watercolor I ever attempted — blurry, muddy slush. Pretty much any Sportflics card will deliver that effect, but we’re not after just any card today.

No, today, we celebrate the 1986 Sportflics George Brett card, the #1 card in the first-ever Triple Action Magic Motion baseball set. It’s the one that changed everything…or at least taught us that Sportflics would not, in fact, follow in Kellogg’s storied hobby footsteps.

Heck, you know the Brett card by now, though — you saw the front at the top of this tome and the back just above.

Bet you thought that was card #5, though, didn’t you? I mean, it has that red “5” in the little baseball at the top after all. If you read the fine print to the left, though, you’ll see that the Brett card lands as “Series 1, Card #1.”

All in all, the card number that’s not a card number was a very Sportflics thing to do.

Thankfully, that part of “in with the new” got left behind when other companies picked at the scrapheap of Sportflics innovations a few years later.

1985 Donruss Highlights and the Magic of George Brett in November

Another hobby first where Brett loomed large was the 1985 Donruss Highlights set. A 56-card issue, it was Donruss first foray into year-end sets and a direct precursor to the popular “The Rookies” that would debut in 1986.

Read more about Brett’s November cardboard curtain call right here.