1976 Topps Star Trek card set

Topps released this Star Trek set of cards and stickers in 1976, depicting the original television series, seven years after the show’s cancellation. It was the first American Star Trek card set in nearly a decade (the previous being the black-and-white 1967 Leaf issue) and the first U.S. Star Trek set produced in full color, geared toward the “whole new generation of young Star Trek fans” that the 1973–74 NBC Saturday morning animated series and the growing convention circuit had cultivated. ^{1 2}

This 88-card set is complemented by 22 stickers, drawing from all three seasons and covering 41 of the show’s 79 episodes. ^{3 4} Card fronts feature a caption and a small yellow Enterprise icon; the backs are headed “CAPTAIN’S LOG,” which is why collectors commonly call this the “Captain’s Log” set. Cards #1–18 and the final card (#88) promote the then-upcoming Star Trek motion picture rather than referencing a specific episode, while the rest name the episode depicted. ^{5 6} Oddly, Sulu is never pictured or even named anywhere in the set, not even on card #13’s cast listing. ⁷

Each pack contained 5 cards, 1 sticker, and a stick of Bazooka gum, sold for 10 cents, with 36 packs to a box. ^{8 9} In Canada, the identical cards were distributed by O-Pee-Chee rather than Topps. ¹⁰ A shortened version of the set was also released overseas by Scanlens in Australia and by Allen’s/Regina in New Zealand, omitting 16 of the U.S. cards. ¹¹

The rarity paradox

This is genuinely one of the more interesting stories in the hobby. According to a trading-card veteran’s account reported by Cardlines, Topps was hit by a labor strike just two days into printing the Star Trek series at its Duryea, Pennsylvania plant. The stoppage reportedly lasted about two weeks, and because the baseball card line was scheduled to run on the same press immediately after Star Trek, Topps pulled the Star Trek lithographic plates as soon as the strike ended so baseball production could proceed on schedule. ¹² Separately, other sources note the set underperformed in its regional test markets and was never given full national distribution as a result. ¹³ Either way, the practical result was a genuinely limited print run relative to typical Topps entertainment sets of the era — no follow-up series was ever printed. ¹⁴

Note: the labor-strike detail is a card vendor’s secondhand anecdote relayed to Cardlines, not a primary Topps source, and the “failed regional test market” claim comes from a hobby blog rather than a documented company record. Both are plausible and consistent with the set’s observed scarcity, but should be treated as hobby lore rather than confirmed corporate history unless a Topps-side or contemporary trade-press source turns up to corroborate one of them.

That limited production also explains why the set turns up “often” in loose singles yet still commands strong money: individual commons are common, but true high-grade examples and complete, well-centered sets are not. PSA’s population data shows the set is dogged by centering problems and print defects, largely tied to its position on Topps’ 132-card printing sheet (12 rows × 11 cards). Cards positioned on the sheet’s edges — including several key cards — suffer disproportionately from off-centering and blue printing-line defects. ¹⁵

• Dr. “Bones” McCoy (#3) sat in the vulnerable top-row, third-from-left position and has never been graded PSA GEM-MT 10 by any submitter — out of roughly 255 copies graded, the best is PSA 9. ^{16 17}

• Lieutenant Uhura (#6) has only about eight known PSA 9s and none higher. ¹⁸

• A War of Worlds (#77) has just two known PSA 9s.

• Cards #1 (U.S.S. Enterprise) and #88 (Star Trek Lives!) — the first and last cards in a stacked set — are frequently damaged by the rubber bands collectors used to bundle sets.

• The 22 stickers are even tougher in high grade, prone to roller marks and gum staining on the back from sitting against the wax-pack gum.

Across the entire 88-card checklist, PSA has graded roughly 14,864 copies total, of which only 236 have ever achieved a PSA 10 — and no single card has a PSA 10 population of 10 or more. ¹⁹

Pricing

PSA’s price guide lists commons around $12 in NM-MT 8, $50 in MT 9, and roughly $400 in GEM-MT 10, while key cards run far higher — a PSA 9 McCoy has sold for over $1,000, and PSA 10s of top cards have fetched $700+ at auction, up from under $300 just a few years earlier. ^{20 21} Unopened boxes have climbed from $300–$600 in the early 2000s to as much as $1,200 more recently. ²² The set’s collectability peaked dramatically in September 2024, when Heritage Auctions sold a previously unknown, unopened case of 24 boxes — dubbed “the greatest unopened find of the 21st century” — for $58,750, a record for any Star Trek card lot and for any television-based card set. ²³