Monday, October 26, 2009

National Treasures: How The Mighty Have Fallen

I just received some of the National Treasures images posted by Panini from a member over on FCB. Sadly, Panini has taken a product that once looked elegant and clean, and turned it into a high end version of Donruss Threads. Panini lovers will love this new direction, but to me, it takes everything that National Treasures used to be and takes a huge dump on it. Its gotten to a point beyond disappointment, more anger than anything now.


First, I want to start with the one card that I think looks awesome.


I absolutely love this card. Love it. The idea of the card is great, the design is great, and although its still a sticker auto in a $500 MSRP set, its still awesome. I would buy cards from this set in a heartbeat, this is the one thing that made me optimistic.


This card features a great group of players, but the design is straight out of a low end set. Busy, small pictures, and floating swatch windows. The card is also incredibly top heavy, and I cant believe this is going to be one of the subsets in NT.


This one isnt bad, except for the fact that the lines and blobs in the back look weird and the text on the side is all strung together like a run on sentence. Not bad, but not NT worthy to me.


I think this card may be straight out of Playoff Prestige. It just looks awfully conceived with odd placements of borders and lines that make absolutely no sense. Also, not really sure why there are two cowboy logos on here when the player pictures are less than an inch big.


This card looks better than the Emmitt/Aikman card, but the background draws so much away from this card. One of the things that made previous incarnations of NT so cool, was that it had an old fashioned type feel to match the focus on retired and star players. This looks like photoshop barfed on the legacy of these two players and I am extremely turned off by it. Why is it like this set has turned into National Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?

Again, I am sad because of what Panini's horrid design team has done to this once amazing set. 2006-2008 National Treasures was awesome, I have a lot of those cards, I would buy more of those cards. I would never in a million years spend $500 on a box of cards that look like this, when I can spend less than a fifth of the money and get the same thing out of early season Panini crapfests.

I sincerely hope the rest of this set looks better.

8 comments:

  1. Earl is nice, but why does the swatch opening say 32 instead of 34?
    http://www.newcardsmell.com/wordpress/?p=808

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  2. yeah, its a mockup, so I doubt this will stay that way. Like when they use the wrong autos in the previews. I didnt mention it because it will probably be changed.

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  3. Natinoal Treasures has been one of my favorite sets for the last three years. It is safe to sa this will be the first year i don't bust a box. If only companies could understand that less lines and colors make the cards look better.

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  4. The White Background with the amazing painted style player pics last year, to the new crazy photoshop of this year. National Treasures used to be about making the cards look like they deserved to be built into a hall of fame wall. Now, they look like they should be in a crappy 80 dollar a box product.

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  5. RIP Treasures. I used to love you. Ah well, more 06 and 07 for me.

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  6. Photoshop is a blessing and a curse to the hobby. NT has now been cursed. Add in the sticker autos and there's no chance I will buy a box. Why does only UD know how to do high-end anything right?

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  7. Yeah, when Ultimate, Exquisite, SPA and Black are all on card, this pales in comparison.

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  8. Don't hate on Panini for what DLP came up with before Panini take over. Design was already laid out for the products by DLP.

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