Over the last few weeks, I have not had one single good thing to say about Elite. Preview after preview left me with the taste of vomit in my mouth, and now that we have started to see how bad the actual cards are, its gotten unbearable. The lockout has left Panini in a jam, and rather than actually think of a way to get out of the situation, they took the laziest possible way out. Oddly enough, it would be one thing if it was just one card or even one player, but its a majority of the set and almost every rookie player is affected. In fact, its so bad, that the people who end up busting Elite may have a lot more problems than originally expected.

First things first. I have already commented extensively on how awful the rookie cards look. The worst part of all of this, is that I was only commenting on the way the rookies look for the players at the premiere. Full pads, full helmet, full everything, and the cards still look as hideous as they ever have. For the players not at the premiere, Panini had one of two choices – either airbrush the cards like was done in prestige, or find other photos. Guess which option they took? Yup, they went to get as many combine photos as they could possibly find, because god forbid they actually spend the time to do the right thing. The result is below, including rookies in polo shirts, workout gear and combine getups. These rookies make up the majority of the box hits and the content of the product, and that is a TERRIBLE thing for this set. Panini only previewed the players who were at the premiere, and now I see exactly why they did this. They didnt want us to see the ugly underbelly this product has.

Secondly, there doesnt look to be a lot of Premiere player autographs of the base variety in the makeup of a case. Although there are combine photo emblazoned on card signatures that look as bad as any cards from this set, many of the regular autos are non-premiere guys. The diecut cards that have always been popular in this set look incredibly weird with the cards oriented the way they are. Because Panini just laid the base design on its side, text and all, the rookie cards leave no feasible place to diecut the cards. Rather than ditching the idea, as should have been done, they “jerry-rigged” it as best they could. The results are pretty much on par for this product.

Basically, now that we see what Elite is really all about, Inception might as well be Topps Five Star, because it is running laps around this cop out of a set.