The Disg-Race is over! Last Thursday’s offering of Garbage Pail Kids Disg-Race to the White House proved to be the last issue for the set. Topps finally completed the online only set, and moved on to various other online offerings. The set is groundbreaking in a number of ways. 2016 was really the year of the online exclusive for Topps. Topps did a number of things across their properties to see how to offer online exclusives to collectors. Garbage Pail Kids were actually the first property Topps tested online cards with the Iowa Caucus set, back in Feb. of last year. After offering a mixture of political and entertainment based online sets, Topps moved to an individual card offerings for GPK. This matches Topps wildly successful Topps Now Baseball Card brand which launched in April of last year. Topps launched GPK Disg-Race on 9/26 with card #1, a parody of the first presidential debate. Originally collectors thought the set would last until the election in Nov. However, as things got crazier and crazier in the election, sales for the cards seemed to increase. Topps decided to ride the wave until last weeks’s inauguration.
How much did you spend collecting the Disg-Race set? How many cards were printed? How much money did Topps make? Let’s take a look at GPK Disg-Race by the numbers… (Thanks to collectors Steve Sodergren and Erica Fox for compiling many of the numbers for this article!)
- 152 – Total number of cards in the GPK Disg-Race set.
- 135 – Total number of GPK cards in the set.
- 17 – Total number of Wacky Packages cards in the set.
- 6 – Total number of artists who painted cards for the set. The artist breakdown is; Simko (64), Engstrom (61), Im (13), Gross (11), Camera (2), McWilliams (1)
- 115 – Total number of days elapsed between the first day the set was offered, (9/26/16), to the last day cards were offered, (1/19/17).
- 40 – Total number of days during that span cards were offered for sale on Topps.com.
- 54,480 – Total number of cards printed by Topps for the Disg-Race set.
- 47,429 – Total number of GPK cards printed in the Disg-Race set.
- 7,051 – Total number of Wacky Packages cards printed in the Disg-Race set.
- 1,196 – Highest print run of an individual card, #1 (Disg-Race to the White House).
- 248 – Lowest print run of an individual card, #143 (Dogfight Donald). There can be more more than 248 complete sets out there.
- 4 – Cards with a print run over 600, (#1, #64, #70, #102).
- $1,164.58 – Amount collectors had to spend to complete the Disg-Race set by buying the daily bundles.
- $1,518.48 – Amount collectors would have spent to collect the set if paying $9.99 per card. This was the most expensive non-eBay option.
- $606.48 – Amount collectors would have spent to collect the set if paying $3.99 per card. This was the cheapest option, only if the 20 card lot of each individual card was purchased.
- $544,255.30 – Gross sales total for all cards printed by Topps, if collectors spent $9.99 per card. This would be the highest possible amount made, which we know didn’t happen. Most collectors bought the bundles for their sets. There were also dealers who purchased card lots for re-sale. Its impossible to know how much Topps really made selling the Disg-Race.
To help celebrate(?) the inauguration of Donald Trump, Topps released a special one time parody set. Moving past the Disg-Race series, Topps decided to do a separate set with both GPK a/b cards, and Wacky Packages cards. Today Topps revealed the print run for Garbage Pail Kids American as Apple Pie Presidential Inaug-Hurl Ceremony. All cards in the set drew similar sales numbers from the mid to upper 200’s. Here are the final print run numbers for each card printed.
