1969 Eskimo Pie Football Cards

There are 15 two-card panels in the 1969 Eskimo Pie set--or 30 cards if you cut the cards off the panels. Neither the cards nor the panels are numbered. The set contains only American Football League players, in what happened to be the league's last year before merging with the NFL. The text on the panels says there are 32 cards in the set, suggesting that one panel didn't make it to production.

According to Beckett, there are cardboard and sticker versions of each of the two-card panels. The cardboard panels could be cut from boxes of Eskimo Pie ice cream bars, and the stickers came on waxy green backing paper. The stickers have nice, rounded, factory cut corners, but the cards, likely having been cut off boxes by kids with safety scissors, are typically pretty hacked up.

The Eskimo Pie ice cream bar was invented by a high school teacher, Christian Kent Nelson, and patented in 1922. The product's current owner, Dreyer's Ice Cream, changed its derogatory name to "Edy's Pie" in 2020.