Product Review: 2008 Leaf Limited Football

Man, oh man, I thought Limited was going to suck ass, but I was wrong. I cant speak for the format change because I have only seen two box breaks live, yet the cards look great. Maybe the other shit sucked so bad because this stuff gets all the women in the donruss household.

The Good

Lets start with the RC patches, because they are finally a card that was designed properly. There was not going to be a jersey parallel, so they were not worried about a floating swatch. Funny thing is though, I think the cards would work either way. The design is great, the die cuts look good, and the pictures look awesome. I posted the Ray Rice because he changed his number and they acutally went and got a pic from week 1 and used that on the card. BRAVO. No more Antonio Pittman mayhem this year. I also like the way the auto is placed on the picture, though with people like Chris Johnson, that will be a problem. Fuck him though.

Secondly, the insert sets look great, looks like DLP got over their nebulous swatch placement, as most of the insert sets I saw as Jersey only, looked really good. The jumbo number jersey cards that they always put out as a subset for both RCs and vets look double as good as they did last year, and the autos for them are some of the best cards in the set. I couldn’t find a good pic, but they are the only ones with giant swatches in diecut number windows.

Moving on, my favorite set is back, Lettermen, and it is glorious. This is what more sets need, fuck that manufactured shit, lets get some nice ass game used shit. The RC letterman are autoed, but they are all event used, still better than manufactured though. I like the design this year.

We also get NFL logo base card parallels and they look really nice, compared to last year where the diecut really didn’t work. I like that we don’t have a GIANT SHIELD but rather just the important part. Certified Materials, take note please. It fits the picture, and doesn’t cover up much of the awesome action.

The Bad

Switching back to a box with more base cards sucks. Limited was amazing in tin form, and that little flip box was even cool, so why "fix" something that aint broken? At least the base cards look okay, but that doesn’t excuse me having to open 18-24 packs. People don’t need this.

I saw a lot of RC base autos, which are never good. An overuse of scrub autos has basically ruined threads baseball, which could have been a product for the ages. I think it should be like SPA where you either get a Patch auto or a Vet auto jersey per box. Enough with the scrubs. I don’t need an auto of the third string punt returner's water boy.

When it comes to cuts in this set, there is no reason to include half of the people they do, and they should not be one per case. Spend more money on nicer cuts and limit the production. I don’t like having the Cleveland Browns' announcer as my case hit.

The Ugly

There really weren’t many ugly things about this set. Thank god.

Overall, this definitely gets my seal of approval, much like Absolute. It really sucks that of all the products released, only three were top shelf nice. That sucks. At least we have Ultimate on the way, which looks good, and only 4 months to SPA. Game on.