Category Archives: Product Review

Product Review: 2009 Upper Deck Heroes Football

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UD heroes is live now, everywhere, and I even had a chance to buy some myself. I think the set has a lot to offer in terms of all the aspects of the hobby, and I think its one of the better products, so far, that has been put out. Its still not going to be on the same level as some of the post-premiere products, though this particular offering has many things that people will love.

Design/Creativity

I really like the base design, as the cards feature an unbalanced photo area that works well with how the players are put into those boxes. They kind of run out of the card design, the borders not holding them in. Considering that design has been a MAJOR fail this year for many products, its good to see that when you take a set that has been around since 1991 or earlier and give it an “injection” as some may say, it still works.

Another part of heroes is the subsets, and this year’s are improved over last year. The painted cards are an extreme improvement, as last year I thought the whole set looked miscut. With Masterpieces being discontinued, these may be some of the only painted style cards we get, and im glad they werent ditched. Im a fan of sports art, all the way through to Leroy Neimann’s golf prints, and I love seeing cards that feature artistic representations of the players.

As I learned from my pack breaks, guitar and music heroes were not the only non-sports part of these sets. I dislike this anytime that it is put into a set, though it seems to be a very popular part of many other sets that are out there. When I see that Vincent Van Gogh and company are added as parts to this product, it seems as though it was an attempt to extend the collectibility of the base set for the same type of people who build the retro sets. Considering that Philadelphia is next on the calendar, it should have been in that product instead. Im not a fan.

When it comes to the hometown heroes set, I love it. I think it’s a great idea for collectors to have the opportunity to pull combined cards of people from multiple sports. Considering that it is a city by city theme, I love it even more. I know there are dual autos and dual jerseys from both of the parallels, and I think that many of us would love to have either. I know if I was a person from Detroit and I saw a Gordie Howe/Barry Sanders dual, I would go nuts. I know there are people out there who really dislike this type of subset because of the multiple sports, but I also think that many people out there will love it.

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Autograph Cards

I think that having on card autos in this set make it more relevant than it normally would be. I also think that its great to see that the players used quite a bit of the signing area on some of the cards, as that is ALWAYS a plus. Also, considering that many of this year’s class have big autos to sign, this could not have been a better situation.

The one problem I did see with some of the auto pulls, including my own, is that some of the sigs turned out kind of streaky instead of being bold. I think it has to do with a lot of things, not necessarily anything that UD could have prevented, but its worth mentioning.

As for the Painted cards being signed, as well as the hometown heroes, it adds some variety to the normal set. Most products just have signed parallels of their subsets, but the stickers don’t normally fit onto a paralleled card. Most of the time with the stuff I saw from heroes, the autos looked very good on the subset cards. It didn’t look forced. It also wasn’t in big giant silver paint pens, so that’s good too.

Lastly, as I have explained before, I collect autos more than cards. For a period of my life, I collected a lot of music autos, and it makes me happy to pad that collection with some of the music autos in this set. However, as a non-supporter of non-sports in sports sets, a lot of the music cards seem out of place. I think in Baseball’s Spectrum of the 80’s hair metal stars, the idea was a fail and a half. Here, there are actually some autos worth your time, right Tom Morello?

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Relic Cards

For some reason, there just arent many Relic Cards that look good to me any more. The ones in heroes look much, much, MUCH better than Prestige Chrome or Prestige itself, but they still don’t look right. I think the parallelogram windows stay out of the way enough, but they still look like they are wierdly forced into the design. Its like UD knew they HAD to have them, and did their best to put them in without looking like the designers were complete idiots. I think they accomplished that, however this may be the time where we let the jersey parallels die. If a card doesn’t have a jersey all the time, just don’t make it. Enough with the parallels, we arent buying it. Save it for retail.

On the dual jersey cards, I did see that some of the players had to be covered up out of necessity. When it gets to that point, we need to re-evaluate our need for relic cards altogether. Again, these cards are no where near as much of a fail as Donini’s horrid attempt, but its still something that needs to be addressed.

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Value To The Collector

Every time you have on card autos of a player, its going to hold value – especially with every single Donini product being mostly on stickers. I think at this point even I would rather have a college uni on card auto of a player rather than an NFL uni sticker auto of a player. That goes against every bone in my body, but I have NO FAITH in Donini’s design team. That fact alone raises the value of this set in my mind.

Still, as many early products do, this will fall as the year drags on. Because Donini uses the middle of the year as their toilet, products like the stale LCM will still overshadow this product. The one product that I will predict to be immune is Philadelphia, because retro sells. ALWAYS. Unfortunately, heroes will not be immune despite the fact it features things that retro sets thrive on with non-sports inclusions.

Pric
e is another major factor, because when other mid end products like Gridiron Gear and the rest of Donini’s mid year “show up and throw up” have the same price point, this will look very expensive for what you get. At least you get a guaranteed 2 autos per box, as it would be pretty awful to pay 100 bucks and end up with one auto.

People, its pretty simple. When there are many products on the shelf, many of which have been around and in our hearts for years, sets like Heroes wont be your first choice. That’s all I have to say about the value of this set. However, the on card autos and some of the other autos may buoy the ship a little.

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Overall Impressions

This set was a horrible edition to the late year calendar last year, but this year, it holds some water. I like the ideas they used for this set, though it will not have the clout of something like SPX or Limited. Considering that, it’s a good spot for it right here, though something like Masterpieces would have been SOOOOO much better.

I would have liked to see 3 or 4 autos in a box and forget the jersey additions to the set, or at least a lower price point. I may buy some singles from this set to add to the 10 packs or so that I opened personally, as the RC autos do look very good.

My take is this, it’s the best of the year so far, but it’s a minor league set in the major league of post-premiere products. When you compare it to Prestige Chrome, it seems great, but when compared to SPA and others, it falls short. I think that’s understood, but a good filler until we get to the later products.

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2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)

1(t). 2009 UD Heroes Football (3/5 GELLMANS)
1(t). 2009 UD Draft Edition (3/5 GELLMANS)
3(t). 2009 Donruss Elite (2/5 GELLMANS)
3(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
3(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)

Product Review: 2009 Donruss Elite Football

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We are four products into 2009, and Elite is the first product that actually holds some value for the collector in the long run. However, while looking at the final product, there were a few major questions looming that I may not have been able to get past. I was able to view a whole case broken by my friend, with disasterous results, but I am not going to focus on the pulls. Just the cards.

Design / Creativity

This year’s Elite is basically Prestige Chrome, and from my review of Prestige, you can pretty much get the feelings I have about this product. First, the set looks eerily familiar, or rather very close to last year. There is also an ugly addition to the base cards with the electrical storm that seemed to be present at the printing of these cards. In the words of my friend “What the fuck is this? Are they on the set of Crank?” Ha.

The subsets have also dropped considerably in terms of looks from last year. The throwback threads is a perfect example of how bad this has gotten. Last year, the cards were so good looking, I actually went out and bought my first non-auto jersey card in a year. This year, they look stupid to me, mainly because the jersey looks like an add on piece rather than part of the design like last year.

The staple of this set, Passing the Torch, has been updated – I guess for the better. It is no longer a front and back card, making it much easier to display. I don’t think the design is awful, but I don’t think it lives up to being THE cards from this product. Plus, when you look at every other company, not many have their crown jewel cards available in millions of parallels, unless you look at Topps High End. But that doesn’t count.

Also, im not sold on this mirrorfoil they have coating each card. In previous years it has become extremely succeptible to pack fresh damage, and my friend’s case definitely felt the brunt of it. Many of his cards were damaged, and though they werent too important, its frustrating. I think they need to get rid of this practice of using condition senstive materials to produce their cards. That is the one thing Topps has down with chrome and finest.

Lastly is the diecuts, something I used to like a lot. However, as a result of the coating on the cards, I saw a lot of damaged diecuts in my friend’s case. Some people love these cards, but I am indifferent, something you could attibute to my lack of love for the base cards. I don’t think it’s a win on these, but its not a fail either.

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Relic Cards

The floating swatches are back, and Donini fails to incorporate the windows into the product with any sort of good ideas. Most of the time the windows look like add ons, as said before, Im guessing because of how many parallels they have of each card. See, with UD, most jersey cards are designed to avoid the floating windows, most likely because the jersey window is incorporated into the design, and the sticker is added later. With Donini, it seems like they just try to fit everything onto a pre designed card. This leads to cards that have floating and out of place jersey windows that don’t fit into the overall feel of the design.

I am continually disappointed with Donini relic cards, they never do favors for my eyes. After the Prestige debacle where cards were designed that covered up the players with swatch windows, I thought things would get better. They didn’t.

I mentioned above that I didn’t like this year’s throwback threads set. Chain reaction and Prime Targets are worse than those, and you have to look hard to find a good looking relic card in this product.

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Autograph Cards

I am a big fan of paralleling the base cards with auto’ed versions, but its tough to find the autos in this set with the time travel residue, the dark cards, and the black marker that was used. I think when it comes to designing auto cards, you have to figure that a special light space needs to be present. On Bowman chrome last year, Topps did a higher half circle. On many other cards from last year, a light picture with a background included is used so that the stickers don’t blend in. None of this consideration was used for Elite.

As for the College ties autos, the cards look completely unbalanced. The autos weigh down the cards completely on the bottom and things look out of place when you throw a sticker on card designed as a base insert. Same thing tends to happen with many of the other subsets with auto parallels, and I think its scary that people think this shit is “cool.” Have we gotten that complacent?

As said above, I liked the PTT autos not being front and back this year, but I still hate all the parallels. I didn’t like that they switched to two tiny pics on the side, however, when you get into duals on one card, its tough to avoid. The PTTs are still the best cards of the product, but for this set, its not saying much. I sincerely hope Classics is much better. Yet, with that school colors preview we got, I am very, very scared.

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Value to the Collector

This is the first set of the year that minimally holds its value, especially in the low numbered diecuts and autos. I think its possible to make some money on a break of this stuff if you get lucky, but if you are looking to keep what you pull – wait for later sets. The PTT autos are some of the more valuable Donini duals, and have been the focus of many collectors who have liked the set.

The rookies arent going to hold too much value unless they are low numbered, but the diecuts and status cards should hold well over the months. I call this set Prestige Chrome, and its funny that the parallels of the RCs really fit this mold.

Lastly, I think its within your best interest to buy the singles as the price of the box is most likely not going to be eclipsed by what you pull. Still not an awful product to buy if you are looking for cards that wont be hurt by the release of the post premiere sets.

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Overall Impressions

I am very disappointed by Elite, I think this could have been done a lot better, especially if they had thrown in a few new concepts. See, with many other products, creativity factors into new subsets and better designs on the existing cards they are remaking. When you don’t change a thing and you throw it out there just to throw it out there, I am going chide you for your laziness. SP Authentic is the set to buy each year because they do a great job of combining the old with the amazing ideas they have for the new. This does absolutely nothing of the sort, and to me that is very frustrating. At that rate, you should just update your set each year with new cards, a “living set” as I saw someone suggest on one of the boards, mainly because I am so bored with stale concepts.

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2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)

1. 2009 UD Draft Edition (3/5 GELLMANS)
2(t) 2009 Donruss Elite (2/5 GELLMANS)
2(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
2(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)

Product Review: 2009 Upper Deck Draft Edition Football

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This year, we have had two duds as our 1 and 2 hitters for the football card season schedule. UD Draft, Upper Deck’s first product of the year, comes out this week and many people have been waiting what the product has to offer. 5 autos per box, most of them on card, and a good design to boot for the masher in the 3 hole. Most of the time, being late to the party is a bad thing, unless the first two guests are Bowman Draft and Prestige. The only thing I could forsee being a problem is the Bowman brand being attached to the Topps product, as that will always draw more people. Either way, I am so glad my favorite part of the card year is coming up. Im going to need it.

Design/Creativity

Last year the design made Topps Rookie Progression seem like it was done on MS Paint, but that wasn’t hard. This year the design is much improved (nice job Lindsey), and I even like the horizontal orientation with the slanty auto placement. It doesn’t interfere with the player’s picture, and even without the auto, the design looks complete – unlike many of the cards in Prestige. The granite look seems to fit well, and the parallels seem to blend better than they did last year.

The only complaint is a lack of NFL presence on the cards, as the college logo makes me think that UD put this set together a long, long time ago. Obviously, to get the signatures on card, you need to do that, so Im not too put up about it considering that the set’s checklist looks about right.Also, UD used the same RC Logo on the card as last year, which I hate, and it looks completely unnecessary on this design. There is no reason for any company to use a stupid logo to signify a rookie card anymore, especially with the amount of information people can get from the internet. I remember it was an issue in baseball because the league forces it to be on the card, due to the confusion over the number of sets. Really, if you need an outdated logo to tell you which card is THE rookie card, you need to learn how to use google more effectively.

Lastly, you can tell this set is put out by UD and that is a good thing. Prestige and Bowman lacked the pizzazz of a well designed set, looking thrown together at the last minute, while this looks themed and nicely put together. Shows you what preparation can do for you, as Prestige seemed like they just threw some twists on last year. This set looks new and fresh (again, nice job Lindsey), and I would choose this over the other two any day. Even the pictures they chose for the cards look intimidating and fit well.

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Relic Cards

This set does not have any relic cards as far as I know.

N/A

Autograph Cards

I really, really like the autographs in this set, as they use a concept that you don’t usually see in the placement of the sigs. Normally I would say that you shouldn’t break something that aint broken, but they look quite good. As the first on card offering of the year, I put this down as a win for UD in terms of the looks of the cards with the hard signed sigs. They just look so much better than throwing a sticker on a pre-designed spot for the autograph to go. This gives players more room to sign, and you can see where it benefitted players like Stafford and Moreno who have loopy and large autos.

The duals fit the theme of the set well, and the alumni association cards are a college team collector’s wet dream. It seemed as though UD knew the type of collectors that would value this set, and included elements of what they want in a set of this type. Considering that no other set has a Stafford and Moreno dual, or anything close to it, you have to give props to UD for beating them to the punch with such cool looking cards.

The problem I see is that the duals seem to be stickers, which is understandable considering the time needed to get two college players to sign a card during the end of the season. I didn’t get to see any of the Vet sigs during the few boxes I saw broken in Vegas, but I assume they will be stickers too. If not, then this product will be THAT much better.

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Value To The Collector

These sets never hold their value, and for good reason. College cards are a waste of space for anyone BUT the college collectors, who are a ridiculously small portion of the hobby. Stupid people always come on here and try to say that Press Poop and Sage are good sets for those type of people and I have said on numerous occasions that I agree. They must miss that for anyone who doesn’t care that Kenny Britt played for Rutgers, all of this is just a placeholder until the post premiere sets. Personally, I would like to see them shift the card season back a while, even though it would mean more time I would have to wait without cards. Offer post-premiere sets with ELEMENTS of this stuff instead of getting it out there just to get it out there.

I would expect that once an NFL based UD set comes out with the players in their new uniforms, this set will drop 10-20% in value. Once the season gets to SPA, this stuff will be at 40 dollars a box. At 85 dollars for a box, the price delivers ten fold over Bowman Draft’s 2 autos for 110, and Prestige’s 1-2 for 120. That means that at least if you buy this out of boredom, you will get something out of it. Having 5 autos a box never a bad thing.

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Overall Impressions

If I had the past three products to choose from for the entire year, I would buy 100 boxes of draft before the thought even entered my mind to buy another early 2009 product, but I would still choose to wait for a post premiere product in any other situation. UD did better than I thought they would with this set, so a kudos is due on that. However, when a product gets delayed by as much as draft did, people get frustrated, especially when there is nothing else to buy. Hopefully the sets continue to be new and fresh, something that would make
me happier than I could ever imagine in such a boring plethora of bad products.

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2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)

1. 2009 UD Draft Edition (3/5 GELLMANS)
2(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
2(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)

Product Review: 2009 Bowman Draft Picks Football

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Bowman Draft has hit stores today and I was hoping that it would take Playoff Prestige and blow it out of the water. I went to the shop by my house over lunch today to watch some of the people there who love to bust new wax, and I must say their reviews and mine were quite less than extraordinary. With Jumbo boxes, you do get quite a few parallels per pack, but the overall aura of the product seems to be very, VERY low end.

Design/Creativity

I like the design of the base cards for the set, and the auto cards arent bad either. The 2 or 3 insert sets look pretty good for what they are, but that’s pretty much all there is. The first base parallel is “Orange” and it looks awfully weird with most of the pictures they used. As a color, you really gotta stick with gold and silver, as otherwise there are going to be some major color clashes.

The auto manupatches look SOOOOO much better than the last time they had this crap, think of the letter ones from finest rather than the disguting vomit that was Lettermen, and you have your ones from this. The college logo patches in this set have sticker autos, and on the white background they don’t look too bad. I saw Donald Brown and Clay Matthews, not bad in terms of looks.

I cant tell you how disappointed I am that there are no chrome parallels in this stuff, as I cant see a reason not to do it. The guys will be in NFL unis for the regular chrome, so why not give us chrome college unis while we wait. If there was nothing else that was done to this set, adding chrome would have made it 10x better. Otherwise, paying $110 a box for gloss base cards of players in their college unis is highway robbery.

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Relic Cards

There are no relic cards in this set as far as I know.

N/A

Autograph Cards

Ill tell you, I had no idea that the base autograph cards in this set were on card. That improves these by about a million percent for that reason alone. At least when you get an auto, you know you wont have to put up with those awful stickers. The college logo cards are stickers, but as I said before the stickers on the white background look so much better than normal.

The auto cards also have normal Bowman parallels, going all the way down to the platinum 1/1s, but just think about how amazing these would be in chrome. That much better, right?

As for the checklist, the list goes VERY deep, and the group A autos are at astronomical odds. Mainly, if you are going to pull an auto, it is going to be Ian Johnson or the like. Granted, if you manage to pull Stafford, Moreno, or someone similar, you will be rolling in dough. So, a double edged sword there.

Mainly, these autos leave quite a bit to be desired, but at least are better than the normal expectations for Topps Rookie Progression and the other visual abortions Topps has had in this slot. It wasn’t too hard to do better than Rookie Progression, but this did do better, thank god. Who will be this year’s De’cody Fagg? Im hoping to find out soon.

Also, there is not a single veteran autograph in this set, unlike Prestige and UD Draft, so you are definitely not going to get anything out of your hits unless you hit a biggie at 1:900+ packs.

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Value To The Collector

If these boxes cost 50 bucks for the jumbos and 30 for hobby (which they will later this year), I would say this is such a better deal. At a gross $110 fucking dollars for 2 autos and a bunch of penny base cards, you are going to go home crying if you buy these boxes. I cannot believe anyone would even think of buying a box of this product, let alone paying the price tag on a pack for 10 dollars at this point in the season. Even the top of the top rookie PARALLELS wont break 5 dollars, and your autos wont break 10 TOGETHER unless you are balls to the walls lucky.

If it were me, I would wait a week, spend 30 dollars less, and buy UD draft for the 5 autos you get out of that box. At least then you have a shot at some veteran autographs, dual autographs, and a MUCH better shot at the top guys. This is as close to goddamn insanity prices as you are going to get. Topps made a huge fucking blunder here, I feel bad for anyone that is enough of a sucker to buy in.

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Overall Impressions

Although the set looks nice in pictures, buy the cheap ass singles rather than even thinking about a box. You can go on ebay and probably buy the whole freaking thing for 10 bucks, some 100 dollars off the box price if you are a set collector with Bowman Draft aspirations. Stay about as far away from this on your shop’s shelves as you can, that is until about 70 dollars falls off the price tag. Come October, Blowout will practically be giving these fuckers away, so watch out for that instead of busting your wallet. Need more proof? SPA, one of the best and most valuable sets of the year costs 120 dollars for a box, this costs 110 and you get NOTHING out of it. Barf and a half.

Average Rating:

2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)

1(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
1(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)

Product Review: 2009 Donini Playoff Prestige Football

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Here it is, your first product review of 2009, but I will warn you it wont be as eventful as you are probably hoping. Basically, the sets that are going to grace this page for the next two months are just going to be fillers in the calendar until the premiere cards are released in july with Classics. At least you can be rest assured that I am not going to hold back just because these sets swim in the shallow end of the pool.

Starting this year, I am going to be doing the reviews differently. Last year I reviewed things in Good, Bad, and Ugly, but I feel it didn’t do a lot of the reviews justice in the format I had created. This year, ill address four important parts of each set, design/creativity, autos, relics, and finally value to the collectors. It will be a five point rating scale of one Gellman to five Gellmans.

= Don’t even think of wasting money on this
= A poor attempt, but it could have been worse
= Meh. Average.
= Exceeds Expectations
= The Best of the Best.

Hopefully with this, I will be able to set your expectations for any particular set, and still have room for the rants that make these reviews so cathartic for me. With that, here is the first review of 2009, Donini Playoff Prestige.

Design/Creativity

The normal cards in this set don’t look THAT bad for this early in the season. The white background on the base cards looks like it does this set a lot of favors. However, that is really the only plus in design this set has. Pretty much all of the other subsets look like they had some trouble being created as you can tell that Donini cant get past designing their cards backwards. Donini designs cards with the auto jersey subset as the main design, other companies seem like they do it differently. What I mean is this, instead of starting with a base card, adding a relic window and then adding a place for the auto sticker, Donini starts with the Auto Jersey card and subtracts without repositioning. This leads to floating jersey windows and off balanced base cards. Please, go look through your donruss cards, the only difference between your auto jerseys and your jerseys are the presence of a sticker. There is nothing else different on those cards. I guarantee it. Really, it makes me angry because you will always pay for 4 jerseys a box, but really they are just an afterthought.

A redeeming part of this set is the auto RC base cards, which look pretty good. I always love when companies use autos as base parallels, and in the early releases, this is a major staple of each set. However, with the other subsets being pretty awful, its tough to justify an entire product based on the base cards and the one auto set.

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Autograph Cards

As I said above, you buy Prestige because it’s the first. Its become so expensive though, I may have to sway you away from buying it because you DO NOT get what you pay for. The RC base autos in this are quite good as I have mentioned, but the other autos leave a lot to be desired, especially the signature manupatch cards. I don’t understand why these are making a comback, but alas here they are. I think that because all the subsets are obviously designed backwards, your auto cards, other than the base parallel sigs, will look very goofy. Prestigious Picks takes that to a whole new level. If you are lucky enough to pull the auto jersey parallel of those subsets, they look fine, but they are also quite rare (numbered to 10 or 5). Basically the autos here fall below my expectations, mainly because they havent fixed the design abortions from last year.

However, they have included base auto parallels of the vets too, which save them from a total waste in this department.

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Relic Cards

The relics in this set are either going to
be college jerseys or vet jerseys, and they will not look pretty when you pull them unless you get very lucky. Based on this, you are going to get windows for the relics that are more than halfway up the card, or over so far to the side that it interferes with the general design of the subset. This set would be so much better if they did it more like UD draft with a focus on the autos (5 per box!) instead of throwing in more jersey cards that wont get you 5 bucks on eBay. If you are lucky enough to pull a patch, which is VERY rare, they will be 2 color at best, as I don’t see Donini using their ‘A’ material this early.

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Value To The Collector

This set never holds its value because its purpose is to be the first on the market. You will pay 80-100 dollars for the top autos now, but half that as the year moves on. Even if you are a college collector, you should wait for Elite as it is a much better product that holds value more. Add in the fact that you could be paying up to 100 dollars for a box, and you are going to shoot yourself in the face when you get 2 dollars of a return on your cards. Without a doubt, you need to wait to buy some of the better stuff, and luckily its only a few months.

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Overall Impressions

That’s about it for prestige, but the flow has started so start beating your wallet into shape if you can. UD draft is coming on the 26th and Bowman DP is coming around that time as well. Its exciting to have cards coming again, but hopefully we see better stuff with improvements over the last year. This product did not deliver on that one bit.

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