If you buy a hobby box, you will receive 12 packs, with 12 cards to a pack. Panini is promising three autographs per hobby box.
In blaster boxes, the numbers are slightly lower: six packs, with four cards to a pack. Panini also promises at least one relic or autograph card in a blaster, along with three Disco Prizm cards.
That Prizm technology looks good on this year’s set. The card front design is vertical, with the player shown in an action shot against a soft-focus background. The player’s name is displayed in black, capitalized block letters, with the team name underneath in a smaller, italicized font.
The card backs include a cropped version of the front photo, along with a five-line biographical paragraph. The color scheme on the back matches the primary colors of the player’s team. Where applicable, a player has a 2016 statistical line, with a lifetime line beneath it.
The Prizm base set includes 300 cards, with a nice mixture of veterans and rookies. Veterans comprise the first 200 cards in the set, while rookies make up card Nos. 201 through 300. There are parallels to be found in Prizm, blue (retail), Disco (retail blasters), green, pink, red/white/blue (in retail fat packs), orange (numbered to 275), light blue (199), Blue Wave (149), Green Scope (99), Purple Crystals (75), Red Power (49), camo (25), gold (10), gold vinyl (5) and 1/1 Black Finite. White Sparkle parallels are limited to online packs and are numbered 20 or fewer.
The blaster box I opened yielded 17 base cards and three Prizm parallels. There also were Disco parallel cards of Falcons wide receiver Taylor Gabriel, Saints running back Alvin Kamara and Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown. The insert card I pulled was a Rize Up insert of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. The Rize Up design was horizontal, with an action shot of Wilson looking downfield for a receiver. The card back features a black-and-white version of the photo on the card front, along with a five-line biographical sketch.
The Wilson card is one of 15 in the subset.
The box hit was a Premier Jerseys card of Steelers draft pick R. Joshua Dobbs, who was drafted at No. 135. Dobbs played collegiately at Tennessee. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think this relic is not one of the more coveted hits in the set, but Dobbs is basically a rocket scientist. He graduated from Tennessee with an aerospace engineering degree. When his football career is over, he plans to use his degree to design and build airplanes.
I guess you could say he had a rocket arm in college, too.
Some of the more recognizable names one might find in this subset are Mitchell Trubisky, O.J. Howard, Deshaun Watson and Leonard Fournette.
The Prizm set looks nice and has plenty of parallels to chase. If shiny is your game, the cards have an almost buffed quality to them.