Leaf Trading Cards, founded in 2010, is a

private company A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

that produces

trading cards A trading card (or collectible card) is a small card, usually made out of paperboard or thick paper, which usually contains an image of a certain person, place or thing (fictional or real) and a short description of the picture, along with other ...

and sports collectibles. Based in

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

, it was best known as a producer of sports cards and other lithographic products. The sports range covered by Leaf include

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team wi ...

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular court, compete with the primary objective of shooting a basketball (approximately in diameter) through the defender's h ...

ice hockey Ice hockey (or simply hockey) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice h ...

, soccer,

Professional wrestling Professional wrestling is a form of theater that revolves around staged wrestling matches. The mock combat is performed in a ring similar to the kind used in boxing, and the dramatic aspects of pro wrestling may be performed both in the ring or ...

and

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...

History

The company was founded in 2010 by Brian Gray in

. Previously, Gray had headed Razor Entertainment, a manufacturer of sports trading cards best known for signing the number one pick in the

2008 MLB draft The 2008 Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft continued Major League Baseball's annual amateur draft of high school and college baseball players, and was held on June 5 and 6, 2008. First round selections ;Key Supplemental first rou ...

, Tim Beckham, to an exclusive autograph deal. After Gray acquired the rights to the Leaf brand name, Razor was immediately shuttered and Gray re-launched the company as "Leaf Trading Cards". Like Razor before it, Leaf does not currently have a license with any of the four major US sports leagues or their respective players' unions. Instead, Leaf has concentrated producing cards of up-and-coming prospects and on niche sports like mixed martial arts and professional poker. In 2011, Leaf came to terms with Muhammad Ali to produce a 100-card set based on the fighter's career. Leaf also has a license to produce cards based on the TV series '' Family Guy''. Leaf Trading Cards have been making professional wrestling cards since 2012. The current Leaf Trading Cards has no connection to the gum and card manufacturer of the 1940s and 50s, nor is it related in any way to

Donruss Donruss was a US-based trading cards manufacturing company founded in 1954 and acquired by the Panini Group in 2009. The company started in the 1950s, producing confectionery, evolved into Donruss and started producing trading cards. During th ...

Pinnacle Brands Pinnacle Brands, Inc. was a US-based manufacturing company of trading cards, focused on sports-related items. Pinnacle produced American football, baseball, hockey and motor sports cards. Founded in 1986, the company had licenses with several ...

, or Playoff, Inc., all of which produced sports trading cards under the "Leaf" name in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

References

External links

* {{Sports cards Manufacturing companies based in Dallas Trading card companies Manufacturing companies established in 2010 American companies established in 2010