Donini Classics is live and here are some images from a case break on blowout.
The only thing I want to comment on is how crappy these cards turned out without the original background. The brown really doesnt fit right, especially with some of the uniform colors, where as the actual field background would have been sooooo much better. Otherwise the results are the best of the year for Donini.
One of the more awesome trends in the industry is that regular cards can have amazing patches. What this means is that you dont need to face astronomical retail type odds to get a team logo or something amazing in terms of a patch. This also means that products like Triple Threads, and other products that rely on contrived scarcity to bolster value, no longer can justify the fact that 1/1s are special in any way from the rest of the product. Right now, more than a giant handful of Topps 1/1 cards are either printing plates or paralleled cards that share nothing more than a different finish on the stock.
Of course, this has led to a major devaluing of the 1/1s, because they arent worth the chase anymore. I can get a Topps Sterling 1/1 and have it look WORSE than the card out of ten. Shouldn’t we just let the cards showcase what makes them special instead of forcing me to stomach a whole product’s worth of cards numbered to 3, even though its really something like 103?
A while ago I said that they should get rid of inserting the print plates into packs, as they are worthless, fugly pieces of scrap metal that are marketed as a chase for people who dont know any better. Im saying now that we should abolish the non-special 1/1s for all non-chrome products. If they want to put a logo on a card and number it 1/1, be my guest, but if they are just going to say the card is arbitrarily a 1/1 because of a different color on the card, a different die cut swatch, or even if there is NOTHING different, I wont support it.
Parallels are ridiculous in this hobby and I think that Topps high end and Donini mid and low end are the worst possible offenders. Donini parallels each SUBSET card at least fifteen times, you have the regular, numbered parallel, jersey parallel, second lower numbered parallel, auto parallel, etc, etc. That sucks, there is no reason to do this at all, other than accounting for laziness in filling the needs of a product.
Im now a supporter of letting the card’s features speak for themselves. If you get a great looking card with a ridiculous patch, it should be worth more because of that, not because its numbered to 7 or whatever. If you get an auto’ed version of a card rather than a regular one, that should be the reason that its worth more, not because its red rather than green.
Its become apparent that this hobby has thrived on greed and ego for many, many years. Someone needs to feel good that they have the ONLY ONE of that one card, someone has to know EXACTLY how many of a said card there are, they need to be the biggest shit out there. No longer are we focused on buying the cards we like or the cards that make us happy, we have to have the most of the rare, the most of the special, and we need parallels to tell us that we do. That is crap.
This fact has allowed the manufacturers to exploit our need to feel special by numbering things lower and lower, yet in reality just letting design quality slip so that the number on the card is the only thing we care about. Look at Upper Deck SP Authentic Baseball, there is so much confusion over the numbering on the letters, that people have literally freaked out. Upper Deck makes it worse by numbering each letter rather than the total number of autos to make the cards seem rarer, and we eat it up. Is your signed G numbered to 5 different than my signed G numbered to 25? NO! Its the same fucking card with lower numbering.
Ill give you this, the collective stupidity of the normal people in this hobby will prevent any semblance of a different hobby from ever surfacing. Collectors are generally so fucking stupid, that companies are even forced use numbering as a way to deter fakes. How absurd is that? People cannot survive in this industry without it BLATANTLY spelled out for them, no one is capable of thinking for themselves. This is why jersey cards have become so overdone, and why parallels are everywhere, because the idiots shit themselves with anticipation over whatever is the latest marketing ploy. It would be one thing if they were clever, but really these ploys are always mind numbingly stale.
It may be a problem in every industry, mainly because Americans are intrinsically stupid, but I get the aura of simpletons more from sports cards than from any other consumer group I follow.
So, Donini sent over another box to Beckett, again a week early. Im sure it was for all the “favors” to be named later, but this one gave us some indication of how deep the love affair really runs. Not only was it a week early, fresh from the factory, but it contained an auto that Donini has been publicizing non-stop since the Premiere last month.
They managed to “pull” (being a subjective term) a Percy Harvin School Colors fugly silver paint pen auto, which in itself isnt that big of a deal. The reason I am mentioning this is solely because of the sheer fuckload of marketing they have done on these cards. They have released digital galleries – twice – as well as provided extremely visible coverage from the premiere signing of the cards.
After seeing all of this marketing crap, I guessed that it was happening because when Donini releases an on card auto subset, its a holiday! No matter that they are fugly beyond belief, they are just happy to be a waiter at the on card auto dinner table, right?
Obviously, post-beckett break, its making a little more sense to me. Considering that Beckett was delivered a box with a top of the class auto from this set, we are now seeing the purpose of the Beckett box break. Its no longer about setting unrealistic expectations for the box breaks that are done by real collectors, but now its about pimping your ugly ass subsets to draw up needless buzz. My uncle, an emmy award winning writer, once said that hollywood only advertises early when its a dog, otherwise they let the stuff speak for itself – then blow it up. Here we clearly have the dog, being blown up as long ago as the fucking rookie premiere. Then you send a fresh box to Beckett with a “great” example of that target? Cmon, im not that dumb.
Im not even going to talk about the 2 patch cards they received in the same box, something that NEVER happens in boxes of Classics.
Lastly, on an unrelated note, Im happy that Donini has sort of solved their floating swatch problems, as some of the jersey cards look good. However, they majorly fucked up the base formula by editing out the field and replacing it with a weird ass brown background. Im not sure why, as I think the field is ABSOLUTELY necessary to do a picture it’s due justice. Without it, you just have overdone photoshop abortions with no character.
I have been talking about design a lot lately, mainly because of the sheer crap that is being churned out at record paces this year. However, this is not going to be one of those posts. An interesting thought crossed my mind, and it made me wonder if we should just do away with Jersey cards that don’t have autos on them. Keep it to patch cards and auto jersey cards, so that the staleness of the plain swatch cards starts to go away.
Here is the situation that led me to this, many of you are already clued in. When it comes to jersey cards, just the plain ones, they don’t sell for more than a buck or two, even if its Tom Brady or Albert Pujols. Most of the time they are just clumsily placed swatches on parallel cards that make my eyes burn, especially when done by Donini. Despite being practically worthless due to the numbers in which they are produced, these are still considered to be “hits” and count towards the normal allotment of the box. Personally, I am bored with these cards, and it seems as though the general buying public is too. Of course, that doesn’t stop Topps from releasing ass loads of “relics” from practice sessions and old timer games, slapping the name sterling or triple threads on it and trying to market it as a high end product.
What is the solution, especially if the companies continue to use the hits per box ratio as a way to draw in buyers? Well, UD has used the non-auto manupatch letters in the past, and that will continue with Icons this year. The letters go for about the same amount as the crap jerseys, so they thought it was a reasonable switch to sway from the monotony. I applaud the creativity, but the cards don’t live up to the status of THE solution to this overwhelming issue.
When you look back and see that 10 years ago, jersey cards were still going for $15-$20 each, you can tell that things have gone in the wrong direction when some don’t even get .10 these days. It used to be that getting a Jersey card meant you had a good box, now it means you have a bad one. I think that we need to address now that those plain swatches arent going to cut it anymore.
If this means that we get boxes with less guaranteed hits per box, I think that’s fine. Maybe guarantee one or two autos, and have the jerseys be an added bonus. Low number them, design them as stand alones, and make sure all of them are patches. I think that may be a start, see where it takes us.
The problem with implementing a solution in this respect is that you need to get all the companies to do it at once, which will never happen, especially in football with 3 competing companies. The minute that one company does away with plain swatch cards, the other will market that they are offering more for the money, no matter the fact that what they are doing is actually worse. Hell, Donini still thinks they have the most on card autos for the market, even though they are the sticker label capital of the industry. They even marketed a product with no redemptions, not mentioning the fact that BOTH competitors have on card autos as their offering.
Guys, its pretty simple. We have become complacent in our tastes. Companies continually exploit the fact that collectors are fucking sheep, and it grinds my gears to no end. I told UD yesterday that all you have to do is slap 38 “relics” onto a card and all of a sudden you have the product of the fucking year. That’s all it takes these days! Seriously! Design doesn’t matter, content doesn’t matter, all that matters is that people feel like they are moving away from the normal swatch card. What they don’t care about is that most of the products that try to do that, only accomplish it by piling more wood on the fire, not putting out the fire all together. That does not fly with me. The solution stays true to the idea “less is more” rather than “A FUCKLOAD MORE is more.”
Lately, design has become my biggest pet peeve. This is mainly because of the fact that in lieu of actually putting out a set that features nicely thought out cards, manufacturers are instead just packing in all the swatches they can. Its gotten bad, really fucking bad. For example, we saw with Prestige and Prestige Chrome that Donini just recycled designs and added more busy design elements to draw our eyes away from the fact that the set was essentially the same as last year. The same thing has happened with a lot of different sets, mostly in previews for upcoming products like Absolute, LCM, and a few others.
In fact, I was just looking over the previews again for Bowman Sterling, and I couldn’t help but think ahead to how awful those designs will look on an actual card. Those lines criss-crossing all over the background is not going to help things, even though the player is much larger than on other products. See, it seems to me that elegant simplicity has been forgotten so that some amateur photoshopper can prove their chops in making grossly overstated cards with crazy lines and needless off-colored backgrounds.
The reason products like SPA have been so successful and widely supported by many card gurus is because cards like the patch autos never blast your eyes like you see in many other products. More proof: in LCM, Donini packs 4 separate swatches on some of the cards, as well as a sticker, all in addition to the crazy foilboard background you see. Why is this necessary?
Its time to set down the adobe stylus and let the photography speak for itself. No more disruptive crap on my cards, no more floating swatches, no more ridiculous color schemes, no more tiny player pictures. If you cant fit most of the player onto a card, you shouldn’t be releasing that design. We used to buy cards to see the players, not the 35 jersey pieces you can stuff onto a foldout card.
I will admit, that over the course of my design ranting, I have questioned if it is just my tastes that wretch at the complicated designs of recent Donini and Topps high end. Then I asked a few outsiders, who have never looked at cards before, and they could not believe that people liked some of the recent designs. One of the people I spoke with, a PR rep for a very prestigious car company, said that if he were running his car ads like the manufacturers were running their product designs, he would lose his job. He said that a few years ago, the good car companies started to shy away from packing shit into an ad, as well as overstating their designs. This helped out tremendously, and he was much more proud of the final product. The companies who didn’t follow suit have had many more problems generating revenue from their ads – moreso with the recession now. He confirmed that elegant simplicity is the way to go, and that I was not certifiable for saying the product designs looked awful. Lastly, he said the foilboard needs to be destroyed. I agree 100%.
I know translating the car industry to the sports card hobby isnt too great an analogy, but I do feel that there are way too many mistakes being made in terms of designing products. The bottom line is that we shouldn’t need to settle for crap, because that is no doubt what is being fed to us. They may say it is filet mignon, but its easy to see when dog food is on the plate. You can bet there will be many more rants coming down the pipeline, as there should be no shortage of fucking gross ideas as long as Donini keeps it up, and Topps takes no warning. I mean, we still havent seen anything on Triple Threads football, right?