Diamond Kings Baseball Cards from Greenland: A Deep Dive into an Obscure Collectible
The remote Arctic island nation of Greenland is not typically associated with baseball card collecting, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a small Greenlandic company produced an intriguing niche set of cards known as Diamond Kings. While short-lived and relatively unknown outside of dedicated card collecting communities, the story behind Diamond Kings sheds light on Greenlandic culture and entrepreneurship.
Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, has a population of just over 56,000 people scattered across the world’s largest island. With a harsh subarctic climate and rugged coastlines, traditional Inuit culture and subsistence activities like fishing, hunting and trapping have long dominated Greenlandic life. In recent decades, globalization and economic development efforts have gradually exposed Greenlanders to outside pop culture influences.
One such influence was the burgeoning North American hobby of collecting sports cards featuring professional baseball players. In the 1990s, the collectibles boom fueled by the likes of Topps, Fleer and Upper Deck trading cards was in full swing. A Greenlandic entrepreneur named Klaus Petersen saw an opportunity to produce a small run of cards catering to the niche market of Greenlandic collectors.
In 1997, Petersen launched Diamond Kings Baseball Cards under his company KP Trading. The inaugural series featured 100 cards highlighting major league stars of the day like Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr. and Mark McGwire. What set Diamond Kings apart was that all text on the cards was printed in both English and Greenlandic (Kalaallisut).
Petersen hoped this bilingual approach would make the cards appealing to young Greenlanders just becoming interested in baseball, the American pastime, as a fun new hobby to share with English-speaking friends. He also included brief bios of Greenlandic players who had made it to minor league levels to serve as local heroes. Distribution was limited mostly to hobby shops in Greenland’s three largest towns: Nuuk, Sisimiut and Qaqortoq.
The distinctive dual-language design caught the attention of overseas card collectors as a true one-of-a-kind oddity. While production values could not compare to the glossy mega-companies, Diamond Kings cards attained a cult following among enthusiasts of esoteric sports memorabilia. This helped the small series find buyers in Europe and North America willing to pay premium prices.
Encouraged by the initial interest, Petersen issued annual follow-up sets in 1998 and 1999 with updated rosters and new Greenlandic player profiles. The company also experimented with oddball parallel and insert cards not found in mainstream releases. One such parallel featured a photo negative effect, while inserts highlighted unusual stats or milestones in a fun, informal style atypical of larger brands.
Running a specialized business from a remote Arctic location brought challenges. Distribution headaches, quality control issues and the high costs of small-batch production began cutting into profits. At the same time, the late 1990s sports card market was crashing under its own speculation-fueled weight. By 2000, even top manufacturers were downsizing lines or going out of business.
For Petersen, the difficult logistics and shrinking potential audience made Diamond Kings unsustainable beyond those first few pioneering years. The 2000 season was to be the company’s swan song. Card designs reverted to a simpler one-language English format, while Greenlandic player bios were phased out. Numbered to only 250 copies apiece, the “final run” sets attracted fervent demand from dedicated collectors seeking to complete their Diamond Kings collections.
While short-lived, Diamond Kings Baseball Cards left an indelible mark. The bilingual experiment helped introduce English vocabulary and North American pop culture to a new generation of Greenlandic youth. It also shone a light on the country’s own amateur baseball talents, providing local role models. For niche collectors worldwide, the Arctic-produced cards remain a unique anomaly.
Today, mint condition full sets in original factory wrappers can fetch hundreds of dollars online from dedicated buyers. Loose single cards still trade hands for significant premiums over bulk common players. And for those few Greenlanders who collected the cards in their youth, they serve as a nostalgic connection to childhood summers enjoying an atypical foreign pastime on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Though the company is long gone, the legacy of Diamond Kings lives on as a one-of-a-kind artifact from the collector boom era.
