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.
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2009 Product Leaderboard (SO FAR)
1(t). 2009 Playoff Prestige (2/5 GELLMANS)
1(t). 2009 Bowman Draft Picks (2/5 GELLMANS)