In my opinion, Rookies and Stars was one of the worst looking products of the entire calendar last year. They used weird fonts, splatter paint designs and overall crap concepts to put out a product that a lot of people were very fond of. This year looks a lot better on paper, but I have yet to get truly excited over a Panini design yet this year. Like Elite and Classics, R&S is a million times better than the previous year’s offering, meaning that Panini is FINALLY on the road to better design elements in their products. However, I don’t quite think they have truly invested enough time to get to a nice point we can ALL appreciate. I guess we will have to wait for the final product to come out.

One thing I will say is that the signed manupatches are terribly lame and played out, and should be scrapped completely from every product. I get that they are ridiculously cheap to produce and prevent another stickered subset from infesting their overladen products, but they are so goddamn boring now that I cant put it into words.

Here are some pics from Blowout: