Many people fault me for my seemingly never ending “personal vendetta” against Panini. But, after seeing the preview for Absolute that was posted on their site yesterday, it should be pretty easy to see why I feel the way I feel about their design and production of their sets. Its not a personal vendetta, its an excruciating distaste for the way they do things. Its ALWAYS about quality, not quantity with me, and quality for Panini is BELOW poor right now.
Honestly, there cannot be much about these cards that surpass anything put out by either Topps or even the NCAA licensed UD products. That says a lot. Its obvious to me that Topps has set goals for 2011 products extremely high, and even when under delivering in aspects, the goals were high enough that the issues are minimal. Panini must be setting their product goals at “JUST GET IT DONE TO GET IT DONE!” and thats it. They also under deliver on many parts of the products so far, which brings the quality level down from junk to absolute shit.
Panini did switch the rookie premiere materials cards to hard signed this year. It looks a lot better than last year. I will give them that. But the design and production of the cards is still so far below their competitors that they are going to have a major issue. Swatch windows look weirdly placed and stupidly cut. Pictures of the players look odd. The foil is rainbow and hideous.
The worst part about all of this is that whomever is the head designer at Panini is not self aware enough to realize all the design and production shortfalls. The cards look boring, uninspired and amateur. The star gazing card of Cam Newton may be one of the ugliest I have seen in recent memory. Really? Bright Red? Big giant #1? What is with all those weird diagonal lines? I would have gone very simple and not made the background so horrible looking.
Lastly, its obvious that they are trying to clean out jerseys of fourth tier players that have been purchased over the year. In a product that costs as much this does per pack, I cannot understand why anyone would want a jersey card of Devery Henderson, Nate Washington, or Cortland Finnegan. Give me a freaking break.
Here is the damage:
the rpm sets are beautiful. everything else is mediocre. not a fan of the stargazing set.
Gellman,
My bigger question for you (one you may want to answer in a separate post), is who is buying this crap? Have we gotten to the point where the only football card collectors left are prospectors and patch/relic collectors?
As best as I can tell, there have been only two “low-end” football card sets released this year so far…Score and Topps. Whereas it seem that every week you post about a new, usually mediocre, high-end product focused on rookies, autos, and patches.
Thoughts?
I can see the RPMs being very collectible this year.