2012 Panini National Treasures Baseball - Panini Steps it up.

If you're like me, and by like me I mean cheap and not well to do, you like to window shop.  I love watching Youtube box breaks and reading forum posts of super high end box breaks.  And the more I watch and read  the less I ever want to actually open a box of this high end stuff.  Just so much risk for your buck.  But I digress, the latest super premium baseball card offering is Panini's National Treasures.  And after watching the box breaks and reading about them on forums I have to say I really like this stuff.  I still would never spring for a $400 plus box of this, but I could see taking that $400, if I had it to blow, and picking up stuff I wanted online.

I have to say that Panini has really stepped it up with this super premium product.  Each "box" contains 8 cards all hits of some kind.  Including one book card and one on card auto guaranteed.  The one thing I would like to tell Panini is when you advertise your product you might not want to refer to most of your subjects as commons.  When you look at the sell sheet and the collection breakdown it says 150 commons and 75 rookies.  That's a terrible way to sell your product.  Might I suggest you say something like this, 150 active, retired, and hall of famers and 75 rookies.  Calling the majority of your players commons really doesn't lend to how great of a product you're trying to put out, especially when your product is 8 cards in a box inside a tin.

But I digress.  There are no base cards in this product.  There are lots of different themes and subsets  but they are all either memorabilia, autographed or both.  And I know I'm usually hard on Panini, but I have to say from what I've seen I really like this product.

Sure there are your base relics like this Al Kaline bat...

this Jackie Robinson jersey.  I really do like the over all design of much of the cards.  Instead of airbrushing all the players Panini decided to do head shots in black and white, cutting off the hat logo and chest logo of the player.  But what you get is a nice close up of the player and for an unlicensed MLB product, they do have a players association and HOF license, it looks really good.  I also think that Panini did a great job making these look retro, but modern and pretty much gave us a modern day cabinet card.   With great filigree and borders and just a really nice clean over all appearance, that  I find very attractive.  Not to mention there are some insanely nice cards in the product. Here are a few I found while window shopping.

There are lots of book cards.  Everything from this awesome Granderson patch to some large plain patches. All are very low numbered.

Panini released a pretty extensive drool gallery before the product launch and one of the really stand outs were the button cards.  Topps will also be putting out button cards in Gypsy Queen this year.

There are also some really nice patch cards too.

Panini also brings back the Rated Rookie with these signed patch cards.  There are also MLB Players Choice cards that are just like this with a different embroidered logo.  No Diamond Kings though which is kind of disappointing.

One of my other favorite themed cards in the set are the Hall of Fame auto cards.

This will be one of the cards I'm going after.  I do believe these are numbered to just 25 and are all hard signed.  A great design with the players year of induction and the HOF's logo.

But probably the best cards I've seen and I have no chance of ever owning one, because the few that I've been tracking in ebay are going for crazy money, are these bat knob cards.

I mean this would probably be the crown of my collection if ever it was to be acquired, or something like this.

Panini put out a drool gallery of these card too.

Color me impressed Panini.  If Panini can transfer this kind of effort over to more mid to low range offerings, if and when they were to get an MLB license, well it just might work out all right.  And the more I thought about it after my whole Look Back at Topps Exclusive License, the more I wouldn't mind the return of Rated Rookies and Diamond Kings.  Maybe there's hope on the horizon.  Anyways congrats to Panini for putting out a great product that I will never buy a box of.  But damn if it ain't fun to window shop.

cb out.

HELP!!!

A little dramatic?  Oh yeah.

My wife had her Ladies who Lunch, Dames who Dine, Chicks who Chow or whatever they call it dinner last night.  It's one of those lady get togethers where they can bitch about men, discuss the latest episode of Grey's Anatomy and other woman issues.  That left me with no real rush to get home last night so I headed down to the Target to pick up a new CO2 Detector. As luck would have it Target was completely out of them.  Serious not a single CO2 detector in the CO2 detector aisle. So I ended up walking over to the toy section to see if they had by some miracle gotten any Lego Series 9 Minifigures in.  They had not. However they had a huge section of deeply discounted toys.  And mixed in to the pile of mostly crap I was able to pull out a Mego Bloks Spider-man play set for $5 and found about 11 Halo Series 3 blind packs for under a buck a piece. Not that I'm into the Halo Mega Bloks, but that's a good deal.  Lets just say I still think my trip to Target was a success.

And since I still had no reason to hurry home I decided to head over to Don's Sportcards which is just down the road from Target in south Anchorage.  I wanted to pick his brain about my  Topps Exclusive Deal bitch I've been working on and just to stop in so he could rub in the fact that his Niners beat the crap out of my Packers.

So what's the point you ask?  This is getting a little long winded you say?  Sorry.

Point is Don had a bunch of new singles from this years Gypsy Queen and Allen and Ginter.  He has a customer he calls the hurricane that comes in and buys a lot of stuff. Opens it there, takes what he wants and usually leaves what he doesn't , mostly base cards, but there were a fair amount of mini's and inserts mixed in as well.

I was able to find the last card I needed for my Gypsy Queen set and found all but one of the Allen and Ginters.  This is where you come in.  I only need one more card.  This one...

#197 Ty Cobb.

So if any of you out there in the Blogosphere happen to have an extra one of these to trade let me know.  Plus I still have a lot of stuff on my need list you can find it here.  And of course I'm always looking for Brewers and Packers cards for my team sets and card for my PC's.

Thanks
CB out!!