The Old Judge (N172) card set was released between 1886 and 1890 by Goodwin & Company to promote their Old Judge tobacco brand. There are 521 known players in the set from the National League, American Association and the Players League of 1890, as well as from many minor league clubs from that time period. The cards themselves are about 1.5" by 2.5" and use studio photos on a blank-back cardboard stock. Player and team name appear on the front, along with other identifiers. Many players have multiple poses, and some players have the same photo identified with a different teams, as the photos were re-used from one series to the next. In all, 2491 combination of players/poses are catalogued in "The Photographic Baseball Cards of Goodwin & Company", the definitive work on the set published in 2008 by Joe Miller, Joe Gonsowski and Richard Masson. The Old Judge set was the first nationally distributed baseball set. Other related cards of boxers, actors, actresses and other celebrities were also issued during this period by Goodwin & Company.
Among the first series of cards from 1887 were 13 cards saluting the 1886 St. Louis Browns World Champions. From 1885 - 1888, the Browns won four straight American Association Championships, and in 1886 they won their only World Series over Cap Anson and the Chicago club from the National League. In 1887, the Browns were at the top of the baseball world, and this series (along with the Scrapps set commemorating the 1888 World Series) reflect that position.
The Old Judge release in 1888 included cards from a short-lived minor league club, the St. Louis Whites, which was formed by Chris Von der Ahe to play in the Western Association in 1888. The club only lasted a few months, but its existence was memorialized in cardboard in the Old Judge set.
The Old Judge set was released during a period when competition among tobacco companies was at its peak in the late 1880s. Inserts such as the Old Judge sets (as well as sets of actresses, American Indians, and other athletes) were a mechanism for driving sales, and were considered an expensive but un-liked necessity by the companies. In 1890, the five leading manufactures came together and formed the American Tobacco Company. This monopoly effectively ended the need for the inserts that had bloomed in the previous decade, and baseball cards vanished from most tobacco products in short order.
The scans below are only some of the cards from the set which picture players with the St. Louis Browns. For a list of all poses that I know of, look here.
Old Judge N172 (Set size 2500+)
Old Judge N172 St. Louis Browns Champions (Set size 13)
Old Judge N172 St. Louis Whites (Set size 15)