Drakes 1985 Cubs

The 1985 set was the final collaboration between Drakes and Topps.  As they have for the past few years, the cards had a front unique to Drakes and a back identical to the Topps regular cards.  They again used a different colored banner for American and National League players.

There were two big differences.  First, the complete set was upped from the usual 33 cards to 44 cards.  And even better (at least for me), there were four Cubs in the set.  The first four years of Drakes had a total of five Cubs, so we've almost doubled the total in one year.

The reason for the increase in Cubs?  Easy--the 1984 Cubs were the NL East champs...the Cubs were actually good!

So Drakes gives us...

Ron Cey, his second Drakes card,...

....the Sarge, Gary Matthews,...

...the 1984 NL Cy Young Award winner Rick Sutcliffe, and...

....the 1984 NL MVP Ryne Sandberg.

Drakes did release sets in three more seasons, but not with Topps.  These cards were also on the box (like Hostess) instead of separate cards.  My focus with all of these different retail sets has been sets put out by Topps and the retailer.  For that reason, I'm not bothering with the other six Cubs cards from the three non-Topps Drakes sets...though I'll probably pick them up some day.