The last two weeks of 2020 will bring some fresh sports card boxes if you’re in the mood for giving yourself a well-deserved gift. Football, the last vestiges of ’19-20 basketball and some very tail end of the year baseball issues are set to hit the market.
Here’s a roundup of what’s on the schedule:
12/16
2019-20 Hoops Premium Stock Basketball
Hoops Premium Hybrid NBA is a new product on Opti-chrome stock with updated photos of rookies and players who changed teams after the release of the standard Hoops product last fall.
This one has been delayed a couple of times, but it’s finally here. A factory set option sold out via a Dutch-type auction format on Panini’s website Wednesday morning at around $3,450 each. The boxes are a different animal and not quite as expensive–but not cheap either.
Boxes have four packs with six cards in each. Each delivers two Silver Prizms plus five more Prizms and one Rookie Variation. Autographs are also possible, including rookies like Zion Williamson and Ja Morant. Rookie Ink Flash, Hoops Ink Flash and Hot Signatures Rookies Flash are some of the autograph subsets.
Boxes (around $300-$350) and singles are on eBay now.
12/18
2020 Panini Immaculate Football
One of the year’s higher end products, Immaculate probably deserves more respect than it actually gets from a price/quality standpoint. Each tin box of the 2020 football edition contains one pack of six cards. Five will be autographs and/or memorabilia cards with one base card or base parallel rounding out the pack.
A First Off The Line edition has already been released. You can see Immaculate boxes and cases on eBay here.
12/23
2019-20 Panini Flawless Basketball
Another high-end NBA product rolls out–this one tied to last season as a new campaign gets underway the same week. On average, each box has eight autographs, one memorabilia card and one diamond card.
Flawless autos are all on-card with some of the first game-worn jersey cards of last year’s draft class including Zion Williamson and Ja Morant.
Boxes of FOTL are already online with regular hobby boxes to follow.
2020 Panini Obsidian Football
Printed on black Opti-chrome stock, Obsidian will also be a one pack per box product with each pack containing seven cards, four of which are hits. The breakdown also includes two inserts and parallels and one base card.
New for 2020 are short-printed Color Blast Black inserts (see Mahomes above). They’re a takeoff on the Color Blast insert from Prizm.
There was an FOTL version dropped already. You can check pricing for Obsidian here.
2020 Bowman’s Best Baseball
It’ll be a trio of products arriving two days before Christmas with Bowman’s Best joining Flawless and Obsidian. Best has two six-pack mini boxes inside a master box. There will be four autographs in each master box along with 12 Base Refractor parallels and one Atomic Refractor. A checklist was released Wednesday and is inside the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
Boxes of Bowman’s Best are selling online for around $200.
12/30
2020 Topps Heritage High Number
Baseball managed to pull off at least some sort of season but let’s face it, we’ll all be glad to get back to a more normal campaign in 2021. Heritage High Number is still scheduled to arrive as we bid farewell to a year we won’t forget.
Each box of the 1971-themed product has 24 packs with nine cards per pack and one autograph or relic card per box. There will be tributes to the ’71 Pittsburgh Pirates and Ernie Banks along with the 200-card base set that serves as an extension of the regular 2020 Heritage set that came out earlier this year.
Boxes are on eBay for around $170.
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