Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Product Review: 2012 Panini Golden Age Hobby Box

 When I first heard of Panini Golden Age I thought of Goodwin Champions. Very similar concept with Baseball being the main sport in the product along with other aspects of entertainment and famous people. Now I'm not a fan of the Goodwin products recently, however with this Panini edition I was intrigued by a couple of things. The first being Panini, they have continued to provide quality products for 2012 and this one would be no different. The Second being the hits you could pull, from a piece of the harness from Secretariat to a piece of wood from the Titanic. Along with Autographs, Cut Autographs and Box Toppers, this was definitely an intriguing product to say the least. 

As for the basics of the product; there are 146 base cards to collect with 25 base Card SP's to find (slotted at 2 per case). Each of the Base cards also have a Mini Tobacco Parallel with 6 variations. Three Insert sets are included in the product, the most anticipated is the Batter-Up pop-up cards. The set of 25 are inserted 2 per box. There will be one Box Topper per box and they will consist of a Ferguson Bakery Pennant (Blue or Yellow), 5x7 Movie Poster or a 5x7 Movie Poster Memorabilia.

Each box will also yield 1 Historic Autograph and 1 Museum Age Memorabilia. The Historic Autographs also have Cut Signatures from 10 subjects and numbered up to /3. Some of the talk around the community is on certain people in the Historic Autograph checklist like Nolan Ryan, Barbara Eden, and Bob Woodward.

Now this product is on the cheaper side of the scale running at $69-80 range so with 2 hits and a lot of potential it was worth the try on this product. Here is the assortment I pulled from my box:
Base cards (Baseball): 57
Base cards (other): 57
Mini Tobacco Broadleaf Brown: 19
Mini Tobacco Broadleaf Blue: 1 Jimmie Foxx
Mini Tobacco Candy Crofts Red: 3
Mini Tobacco Ty Cobb Tobacco: 1 Gordie Howe
Headlines: 2 (Secretariat, Kissing War Goodbye)
Batter-Up: 2 (Early Winn, Jack Dempsey)
Newark Evening World Supplement: 1 Ron Turcotte
Box Topper: Bill Dickey (Yellow)
Historic Signature: Don Larson (on-card)
Museum Age Memorabilia: Sam Snead, Bill Madlock
I had fun with opening this product up. The cards are nice and I really like the mini's to go along with them. The Larson autograph is nice for me being a baseball fan and wasn't sure what other people I would be getting out of this product. After the Snead hit I thought I was done, but then the Madlock came within the next 3 packs as an extra hit which is always great to find. The Snead material is very rough like carpet almost so not sure what this is nor does it say on the card back. The Madlock is a very nice multicolor swatch/patch that again is nice for a baseball collector like myself. I did end up with a couple of doubles in the box, but I will take that for the extra hit. Also I liked that the Baseball cards and other personalities in the set were split 57 each in the product. That is a great assortment for a multi-sport product.
Overall this is a decent new product into the multi-sport lines from Upper Deck and Topps. I think this will do well going forward and like I said before, Panini always provides a high quality product which is something you can always count on. if you not into multi-sport or baseball this is not the product for you, but if you love Goodwin or Ginter, then I'm sure you've already bought your box/case of this product and enjoyed it as much as I did.

Gambler Overall Rating: 4.3 out of 5
Cost: 5/5
Autographs: 4/5
Memorabilia: 4/5
Inserts: 4/5
Concept: 4/5
Fun Aspect: 5/5

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