Of all of the Panini products that they parade around like its some accomplishment, Absolute has been usually been the worst of the worst. In reality, there has been ABSOLUTELY nothing that gets changed year to year, and really, its beyond annoying. Up until last year, Absolute was just a rehashed set every single year, with very little that is added to the product to make it interesting. As a result, there are more cards like this eye sore, that makes me want to scream. One isnt enough? How about another example of a complete train wreck
? As we can see with some of the cards, things are heading in the right direction, but we still set more and more examples of the complete lackadaisical approach that Panini has become infamous for.
As for things they got partially right, the Rookie Premiere Materials cards are a vast improvement over last year’s. In fact, since last year’s cards looked identical to 2007-2009, it’s the best we have had in a long time. The design is still miles behind the stuff we saw from Upper Deck prior to the loss of their license, and it is miles behind a lot of the stuff Topps is doing this year. Obviously someone at Panini felt a little threatened by how many of Topps’ sets are offering on card signatures, because this year’s cards will be hard signed. It’s a huge deal, but as we have seen with many of the cards that are foil stock signed with permanent marker, things don’t always work out. If there is one thing I would eliminate from cards in general, it would be rainbow and regular foil, and its one of the main reasons I hate this product as much as I do. Now that they are offering on card signatures on foil, it could be a complete disaster, or it could completely improve the collectability of this set. The horizontal design leaves some to be desired, as shown below by my favorite mock up creation artist, but its better than what we have gotten in the past.
MOCKUP RPM AUTO - MUCH BETTER VERSION
CURRENT PREVIEW RPM AUTO
When looking at the inserts for this product, its Panini-ville all over again. Stupidly named subsets with worse looking designs than ever. Because these cards will make up the majority of the hits in the pack, Panini is sure making it easy to buy the competitor’s products over theirs. The War Room cards are definitely the worst of the preview, as again, we get pads on and helmet off. I have no idea why Panini is so obsessed with these creepy ass pictures, but here we are back at square one. Im not sure why there are not more cards created in the structure of the Absolute Patches set, as it has a simple name, and a relatively good design. No retarded play on words needed for this one, just what it is and what it contains for the name.
People fawn over these cards because they have the “OMG SICKZ MOJOZ!!!!11!” patches on many cards, but for someone that values the way a card looks overall, a lot of these cards turn out to be visual diarrhea. Guess that is par for the course though with Panini.
Base cards – meh. I do appreciate there being a background though.
Ground Hoggs – Awful. Just plain awful. It has a patch and a signature, and yet they STILL managed to waste a huge amount of space with blank white. Give me a break.
Marks of Fame – Meh. Even fully loaded, there’s nothing interesting here. And less than fully loaded? Again with the wasted space.
NFL Rookie – Actually, this is among the better ones. I actually don’t mind this card at all.
Absolute Patches – Also the better ones. I like this one too.
War-Room – Awful. Easily the worst designed card. Where is the war room? It’s a head shot picture with a patch? If you took “war room” off and put “studio rookies” we wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. If you’re going to make a lamely-named insert set, at least bother to put SOMETHING on the card to match it.
For the War Room set the players should be dressed in slacks, powder blue dress shirts (with requisite sweat stained pits), a striped tie, and a pocket protector. As it is now the name has absolutely no connection to the set. This was a product, like Limited, that I used to allot a good portion of my $2,500 that I spent annually on DLP products. I will just be buying a whole lot more chrome this year!
cant wait for this product loved the retail cards specially the rookie jersey collection set it was pretty awesome and hard to get the set together…might do this into a yearly thing and start collection this next years RJC cards