Today Panini released the preview photos for the final and biggest release of the year, 2010 National Treasures. After an utterly disgusting 2009 offering, this year’s set looks to be a lot better. I still have things about this product that make me beyond angry, but at the very least, this looks to be the best looking product from Panini thus far for 2010.
The main complaint I have about a product like National Treasures is that for 400 dollars a box, sticker autos are completely inexcusable. Even Topps, a company who has used stickers in EVERY box for the last four years, upgraded to hard signed cards with National Treasure’s main competition. This fact alone makes National Treasures a practical afterthought to begin with, but at least this year’s design is more like what we have come to enjoy from 2007 and 2008’s version.
The Rookie Patch Autos, one of the only hard signed portions of this product look pretty good. They went with the simple white background, full player photo and nicely oriented swatch windows. A complete upgrade from last year’s bubbly autographed disasters, these cards should be some of the most valuable of the year. I will definitely chase my targets in this set, something I have not done up until this point with many of the Panini releases.
I also love the look of the colossal swatch cards this year, as the design features the oft underused and underrated patches jersey motif as the theme. Although the shield parallels will be one of five million, it looks like these cards will transfer well between the parallels.
When you look at all the different cards they preview here, there are only two that stand out as horrid to me. The first is the Jerry Rice card which looks oddly composed with the jersey swatch in the middle, and the timeline card of Namath that is a complete fail when you see how good last year’s looked. Regardless, having two cards out of around 20 that look awful, thats a win under Panini’s standards, although I will reserve final judgement until the actual boxes hit shelves. The problem with Panini previews is that they always focus on the jersey auto parallels of the cards and leave out all the floating swatch crap jerseys that infest the boxes like little rats, but National Treasures has the ability to move in a different direction.
In reality, this stuff will most likely fall far short of the success that Topps Five Star is going to bring, but at least it doesnt look like a 400 dollar box of Threads like it did last year. From what I can say here, it looks like Panini actually did something right for once, but they are still not anywhere close to where they need to be.
The person that pulls the Barry Sanders/AP dual logo tag will probably have a heart attack…that looks beyond sweet. And this year it actually looks more like a higher end product.
At least it looks better this year. I might get some single cards on ebay this year.
not bad way better than last year. Hopefully the other subsets will look better and the content will be better as well.
that manning on the top row is pure crap. If that’s supposed to be a base card that’s just pointless. There’s more white space then picture. When will these companies learn that we want design, innovation,and pictures on cards. You can buy the whole MLB jersey game used from a ballpark for $225 so why would I buy an ugly card with a small swatch for $400 a box? This kind of product drives me nuts!
You forget that Panini needs to make 38 different parallels of the card, so of course they need all that space without adjusting the design. Its why Panini produces the worst crap on the market. They fill out their sets with five million parallels of 10 cards and hope that people dont get that the cards look like they are incomplete.
I like the ring of honor card but I wish they were hard signed. Same as the Jerry Rice….once again…should be HARD SIGNED!