After seeing this Quality Control gallery, I think Playbook might be the best looking Panini product of the year. That is no april fools joke. Of course, that is like saying this pig is much better looking than all those other deformed hogs over there, I get it. Also considering how much this stuff costs per break, and how the boxes look to have turned out, I cant understand anyone wanting to jump into cases of this stuff.

First, starting off with the focus of this product, the books, they definitely look very nice. Its amazing how much nicer they COULD have looked, especially if the studio shot on the left side was replaced by another game shot like on the scrub rookie autos. The numbering on these is ridiculously high, and further goes to show just how many of these jerseys the rookies probably wore at the premiere. Again, people care about the content of these patches above the design and signature on the card, and that baffles me to no end.  Regardless, its about time that Panini made some white dominated cards, as it adds to a higher end look in this case.

Moving onto the jersey booklet cards, which would piss me off to pull over a rookie auto patch book, they look ridiculously awful. My favorite is the Cowboys one that was labeled “BOYS” in the diecut window. Although not the intent, I immediately associated the four players on the card with pedophiles, a thought that immediately should have sprung to the minds of the idiots who decided to put Danny White on a card with three legends. I wholeheartly hope that Panini runs out of swatches from the Danny White gamer they accidentally bought. At this point, its better just to toss the rest of it than to continue to put him in high end sets.

In terms of the rest of the content from this set, we see a lot of what Panini continues to do well – signed base cards that have no jersey parallel. Not only do the scrub rookie autos look AWESOME, the other autographs look really nice too. I like the base design a lot, and the fact that they again played to my soft side with adding autographed parallels, makes me want to chase a few of them. I also like the accolades autos, but I dont think there will be any players in the checklist that I normally collect.

When stores get these boxes on their shelves, it is going to be essential that they do not break them up into packs. Just from the few pictures that I see here, I can already tell which of the packs holds the booklet.

Panini probably didnt mean to show up National Treasures, but I definitely think they did. One big weakness to all of these types of sets is that Panini has made ZERO investment in on card autographs for the veterans, which is something that is INEXCUSABLE for a product that costs as much as this does. I remember they previewed the sell sheet for Playbook, which featured a Bart Starr/Aaron Rodgers auto booklet on the same day Five Star showed the same style of card with hard signed autographs. Its ridiculous to believe that now that April is here, Panini couldnt have gotten off their asses and planned out the product well enough to get this stuff taken care of. They want to compete in this market? Thats how you do it. Despite my objections over their ugly cards, adding on card autographs would silence a number of the other critics. Right now, Panini is still playing AAA ball, while Topps has been called up to the big leagues.

New super high end products in this hobby rarely perform well in their first year of release. I feel as though this product will fall into that category, especially with the price tag it has. As if it didnt need further handicapping, Panini isnt releasing Playbook to the internet dealers until a week later than hobby stores. I laugh, because again, the aforementioned fact is not an April Fools joke.