After seeing that Brett Favre is going to have his first Viking “auto” in Certified on Panini’s webpage, I want to say a few things about the set preview they posted. Certified is next on the calendar, I believe, and is another in the mid end set line up that Donruss releases every year. Threads, Certified, Limited, Gridiron Gear, they all usually blend together.
First, I am actually surprised that Favre’s auto card looks pretty good. Aside from the horrid foil board that its printed on, and the fact that it looks EXACTLY like last year’s set, its not bad. The problem is that its just too easy to slap a sticker on the card and call it his first Viking auto. When you are almost 100% stickers in your sets, its kind of a cop out to claim that you are first. You could have put him in a Twins uniform and called it his first Minnesota auto. That sticker sort of invalidates the claim. Besides, it wont be about quality as the card will probably go for hundreds, despite the Playoff hologram background on the Donruss sticker, and that it will most likely only have 5 copies.
Second, the preview shows some pretty cool looking cards from the set, which made me feel weirdly anxious. Of course, these are all some of the best hits of the product, so I will withold total judgement until I see the rest.
The dual swatch freshmen fabric cards look great this year, surprisingly. They went back to the horizontal stack rather than the vertical stack, and it works SOOOOO much better. I may actually want a few of these, even though the rainbow foil is completely distracting.
The fabric of the game autos look good as well, but again, these are rare ass fucking cards, maybe limited to 5 or 25 copies at the most. The swatches are even in the right place, yet, I am very scared as to what the normal, non-auto versions look like.
The triple and quad swatch freshmen fabric cards are just as bad as they were last year, floating swatches and all. The quads are almost too busy to comprehend, and they break the design borders, unlike the duals which look cool. The souvenir stamps also look as bad as they usually do, mainly because that stray swatch looks extremely out of place. Although the rookies finally found a way to fit their signatures into the window below the stamps in these cases, others wont be so lucky.
Lastly, these Immortals cards are ridiculously awful. Yes they feature swatches and autos in some rare cases, but the player is being chased by huge obscuring text and out of place windows and stickers. Just a poor design and a poor decision to try to stuff all those things onto the cards.
Overall, I am still VERY apprehensive about this set. If these cards are the best of the best, and they just spike my awesometer to a normal expected level, what will the rest be like?