Each week over the past year our resident card expert Joe Lowry has given everyone on our Prospects Live Discord Baseball Card chat a heads up on what’s dropping in the Hobby. We’re now bringing those posts over to the main site to help keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time. This week we have two products being released: 2021 Topps Triple Threads and 2021 Panini National Treasures Baseball. For 2021 Topps Triple Threads, see last week’s TWiBC post. This post will be updated if more news and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2021 Panini National Treasures Baseball
2021 Panini National Treasures Baseball is scheduled to release on Friday, November 12th and is a higher-tier product.
There are two hobby formats - a regular Hobby box and a First Off the Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Both formats provide eight cards on average which are all autos or memorabilia cards - there are no base cards in the product. Last year I recall seeing a lot of nine card boxes with the split typically half and half between relics and autos plus the promised one booklet card per box. The main difference between the regulary Hobby box and the FOTL Hobby box is that the FOTL box will provide exclusive one purple parallel auto and one purple parallel relic card. The FOTL Hobby boxes were sold through a dutch auction on Panini’s website last week starting at I believe $1,200 and finished at just over $645. Regular Hobby boxes are going to be around $625 at the time of writing.
The design hasn’t changed much from last year - a white base with a lot of different design elements depending on the subset. The big deal here are the booklets and the patches. Unfortunately most if not all of the patches will be player worn for current players, but there are typically plenty of legends where you do have an opportunity to get game worn memorabilia. With the player worn mem, you do get some really nice patches. Booklets are often a hot item simply because they are just not common in most products. The final thing to mention here is that typically the majority of the autos are on card which you would expect in a product at this price point - we’ll see if this continues to hold true in the 2021 product.
The checklist has yet to be released, but you should expect to see a lot of the hot rookies, current stars, and legends of the game. There is also the potential for a few prospects to be found as well - last year we had guys like Jasson Dominguez, Wander Franco, Bobby Witt Jr., Adley Rutchsman, etc. in the product. With such a high end product, it is disappointing the amount of rookies we get that are a lot less desirable and I don’t anticipate that changing this year. Last year we had guys like Ronald Bolanos, T.J. Zeuch, Michael King, Tres Barrera, Fake Mike Trout (Matt Thaiss), Domingo Leyba, etc.
I tend to stay away from National Treasures due to its high price point and unlicensed nature. I’d rather get a very similar product in my opinion from Panini for half the price in Immaculate Baseball. But the National Treasures brand does hold some cachet given how strong of a product it is with the Football and Basketball collectors, so there is some value to be had for the bigger hits. My approach is to watch the product being opened in breaks and enjoy it from afar because it does look great and then pick up a single or two for my PC after the market cools down because they can be had for cheaper than you would expect.