Over the last few days, we have gotten an extended look at some of the chase cards out of this week’s pending release of National Treasures over on Panini’s blog. With the case run production upped to maximize profit, these types of cards will be that much more rare, and the trickle down effect will hit each of the insert sets these cards come from. Whereas before, the rookie auto patches were one per box or every other box, this year they look to be one per case. This will not make people happy, especially when people find out what will be included in their place. Basically your box of NT will most likely contain 1 scrub auto (non premiere attending rookie), 3 insert autos, and 4 crap jersey/patch cards. When you do pull a RAP, it will most likely be someone like Marcus Easley, Eric Decker, Mike Kafka or the like, as these types of rookies overrun the 2010 class.

Panini doesn’t want you to think about it this way, as they want the pre-buys to keep rolling in, hoping that people wont realize how shitty of a product this truly is. You thought 2009 looked like an overpriced box of Prestige? Well, this product is worse, both in terms of content and design. Of course, that wont stop Panini from overloading their previews with pictures of signed Reebok logos and signed logo shields. In fact, of all the National Treasures posts, 100% contained some sort of reference to the chase element of the product in picture form. Where Topps gave us a huge sampling of Five Star before release (no logos at all), we really havent seen the general overlay of how NT will look. We just see the best case scenarios for the boxes they hope you will buy. They avoid showing the THOUSANDS of junk jersey cards where the swatch is placed oddly on the card, because that gives people the CORRECT idea of what a highly overproduced super high end product truly contains.

Worse than that, we are going to continue with the logo overproduction again for National Treasures, something that plagued the product last year. Each rookie looks to have up to 10 logo cards, some signed, some not. This devalues the ones that the lucky people DO pull, because its tough to put a chase value on a card that isnt as much of a chase. We dont even know how many of the reebok logo signatures there will be for each rookie.

Here are some of the pictures they have shown, and yes, these cards do not look bad. However, if you want a good representation of what the product REALLY looks like, check out the QC video they did a few posts prior.