Product: 2014-15 Prestige Plus retail box
Break Date: October 30, 2014
Hit Breakdown: Three autograph and/or jersey cards
Summary: Panini decided to take its Prestige line in a different direction in 2014, and made it a retail-only product. Personally, I like this move. I'm a sucker for retail, and frankly, there are plenty of people who don't have card stores anywhere near them, so this is a targeted effort to do something for those folk.
There are four levels of the product - there's the Premium, which comes with six hits (and is priced at a premium - $200+), and then a slightly smaller three-hit box at $60. And then, there's the blaster and hanger.
I was out-of-pocket for about a week, at a family function and then out of town at a conference for work for three days. While I was gone, the message boards I frequent exploded with people breaking the product. It seemed that folk were high on the Plus boxes and the hangers, and that blasters and the Premium boxes were really more miss than hit. So, when I got back to town, I hit up my Target and picked up a Plus box and a hanger.
The Plus box features three hits, and for the most part, that means one auto and two jersey cards, so I didn't expect much. The card design itself for base cards out of Plus really reminds me more of Absolute than Prestige because of the all-over foil design; they're definitely higher-quality than the hanger base cards, which lack the foil completely.
The one auto was Cory Jefferson, the last guy picked in the draft. Normally that'd be a huge whiff, but he actually got some decent minutes in the Nets' opening game and scored 8 points, so who knows?
The jersey cards were decent - an Ibaka and an Aaron Gordon (again, like I said in my Hoops break, I really like Gordon).
The card that has the most potential, though, came out of the first pack - an Andrew Wiggins Bonus Shots rookie, /199. Wiggins hasn't done a whole lot in the first two games, but he's going to get every chance to develop in Minnesota.
So, there were no huge home runs here, but three hits for $60 out of retail is definitely worth taking a shot at. There were a ton of parallels and inserts, so even if you don't land the big fish, there's plenty here to chase.
Grade for the product: A-
Grade for the break: B-
Prestigious Premiers: Cory Jefferson
NBA Materials /99: Serge Ibaka
True Colors /199: Aaron Gordon
Bonus Shots Blue /99: Tony Parker, Isaiah Thomas
Bonus Shots Red /199: Andrew Wiggins (RC), Marc Gasol, Gorgui Dieng, Jeremy Lin, Joe Harris (RC)
Pioneers: Bob Cousy
Franchise Favorites: DeMarcus Cousins
Hardcourt Heroes: Kevin Love
Connections: Klay Thompson/Rick Barry
Prestigious Posts: Blake Griffin
No comments:
Post a Comment