I spent many words for this product, enthusiastically calling it product of the year and busting my pocket to get a box, but from what is emerging from the first day of live box breaks, I was totally wrong.
Fact is, I was fooled by months of Panini showing out the sickest patches, the most beautiful booklets I had ever seen, hoping to get at least one of them in my box, and when in the last days of pre-release they finally showed the real nature of this product, those ugly, useless autographs of unknown youngsters, all I could think was:”Well, I hope I am not the one finding one of these autos..”.
It turns out, I will get not just one, but at least two, with the likely chance of three, of this useless stuff, because these packs are loaded with those cheap autos, and you can’t understand in the first place the reason of putting them in a product that was supposed to be focused on hall of famers and greats of the game.
And mind you, don’t you think the remaining cards are better, since for the most they are plain, simple pieces of relics, like the ones you can get on ebay for 15-20 dollars.
I understand I can’t have 250 dollars (actually, 340 for me, considering shipping and custom fees) of hits for the 250 dollars I invested, but I want at least fair value for my money, and weighting the factor of having 2, maybe 3 useless autos already, I expected at least one super cool patch or autograph.
At the end of the day, at least, I learned two lessons from this product:
1. never, ever, (let me say better..NEVER, EVER) trust a new product before seeing it “live”;
2. Panini, at least in the baseball department, is sooo far away to become a serious competitor for Topps, you can’t even put the two companies in the same league.
If prime cuts survives the huge disappointment of the collectors base and comes back for a retake next year, I for sure know I will buy a box of Topps Museum, instead.
P.S. If this is the high end product, I am scared to see what’s inside Limited, when they finally decide it’s time to put it on the market after all the deferrals it went through.
