Helping to keep everyone up-to-date on what is coming out and what might be worthy of your time in the Baseball Card Hobby for the current week. Check out our Discord for more discussion on this and any other hobby chatter - Prospects Live Discord.
This week we have two scheduled releases - 2022 Panini Elite Extra Edition and 2022 Topps Chrome Baseball Sonic Edition. This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
Off the top, I will say that this week may see the last Panini baseball product (outside of perhaps Stars and Stripes USA Baseball) for the foreseeable future. Currently there are none listed on Panini’s production schedule.
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2022 Panini Elite Extra Edition
A prospect-focused product, 2022 Panini Elite Extra Edition is schedule to release on Friday, February 24th.
There are two Hobby formats - a regular Hobby box and a First Off The Line (FOTL) Hobby box. Each configuration promises 8 autos and 2 relics for a total of 10 hits per box on average. The only difference for the FOTL configuration is that you are promised 2 exclusive parallels. Regular Hobby boxes are currently $100 pre-sale. FOTL boxes went on sale on the Panini website on Thursday, February 16th via dutch auction format starting at $250 with a floor of $100, which it hit. There are retail formats as well including blaster boxes, but you won’t have any of the “Optichrome” cards in the product as those are a Hobby box exclusive. Blasters promise 2 hits on average, which can be autos and/or relics. ***Update - Panini is selling regular Hobby boxes for $100 from their website on Friday, February 24th.
The design is relatively similar to the 2021 version - a full border with an inner border and a lot of angular lines and shapes throughout. Nothing special, but not bad either. Inserts aren’t typically anything to get excited about in EEE, but this year we get On Campus for what I believe is the first time. This is something we’ve seen in Panini football and basketball college products, but not yet in baseball. It is essentially the college version of a Downtown card. It will be short printed, and I think there will be a fair amount of interest in some of the players who have one. Unfortunately none of the big name players have them, but Brooks Lee, Colton Cowser, Kevin Parada, Jack Leiter, and Kumar Rocker should all have varying degrees of interest. Not sure why the went so hard on the vets in this insert though. I really don’t think we need a Fred Lynn On Campus card.
The checklist is mostly made up of prospects with a majority of those products coming from the 2022 MLB Draft. Jackson Holliday, Druw Jones, Termarr Johnson, Kumar Rocker, Elijah Green, etc. There are some additional prospects not from the draft that are interesting as well, including Junior Caminero. Finally, there are the Dominican Summer League prospects that are typically lesser known names, but can be surprising pop-up prospects in the future.
I enjoy this product, especially at a lower price point. Once the initial release date is in the rear-view mirror, you can tend to find hobby boxes at sales prices in the $70-$75 range, which comes out to less than $10 per hit. Most if not all autos are stickers, and it is players in their college/high school/DSL uniforms, so collectors tend to value these cards less. But you do get access to these prospects at a really good price.
2022 Topps Chrome Sonic Edition
The final chrome edition (we think) of the 2022 product year, 2022 Topps Chrome Sonic Edition is scheduled to release on Friday, February 24th.
There is only one announced hobby configuration - a Hobby Lite box. There are no guaranteed hits - each Lite box comes with 4 Black & White RayWave Parallels and 1 Sonic Refractor Parallel. Boxes are currently going for $80. ***Update - Topps is selling Lite boxes on their website for $80 with a customer limit of 8 boxes.
The design is what we are used to with all of the iterations of the Topps chrome base products. Expect plenty of base in this edition. The Sonic Refractor parallel is the new new in this product, and it looks fun with the sort of impact/sound wave design. There are two inserts - Youthquake and Expose - the Youthquake being a throwback that seems like the design should have been left in the 90’s and the Expose being more on brands with a colorful wavy design. There are rare Dual and Triple Autos with a lot of the signers being vets and ex-MLB players. These autos look to be all stickers, as most multi-player autos are.
The checklist is the same as the base 2022 Topps Chrome base checklist (essentially it is that base set - there’s no different numbering or anything). We also get the base short prints from Topps Chrome- Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodriguez, Spencer Torkelson, Hunter Greene, and CJ Abrams. The Image Variations are different from the 2022 Topps Chrome full release - there the 5 short print guys from above plus Wander Franco, Josh Lowe, Jarren Duran, Oneil Cruz, and Brandon Marsh. The autos don’t include most of these desirable rookies - most obvious omissions being J-Rod and Witt.
I like the Sonic Refractor Parallels. I am in no way paying $70 - $90 a box for a shot at a single random one. Hopefully those stated guarantees are way off and we get 3 to 4 per box. If not, this is a huge gamble that you hope to hit maybe about 1 of the 10 cards in the Sonic Refractor parallel out of over 200 that would get you your money back or more. I’m not going to take that gamble. I’ll just buy a Brandon Crawford version for quite a lot less and be content with that rather than taking the low odds gamble.