Flawless Finishes
Everyone connected with the industry knows about the "premiumization" of sportscards releases over the past several decades. Arguably this started with 1989 Upper Deck, but has continued in various aspects over many different companies and releases. In 2003-04, Upper Deck released Exquisite Basketball, which has led to some of the most sought after and most expensive basketball cards of all time, let alone the modern era. In football, and then spreading to other sports, Panini developed National Treasures as a competitor to Exquisite. And more recently, Panini developed even further premium type releases that retail for several thousand dollars a box. We aren't talking box sets like Topps Transcendent (a post for another day), but just regular releases with a normal set of cards. Well, Flawless did well enough in basketball to transcend into other sports like Football, Baseball, and Soccer.
Who benefits when this super-premium content is released? Besides the card manufacturing companies, you could argue that group breakers do well with these issues, as people are willing to gamble for big dollar hits, and it's easier to sell group breaks with only a few slots per box. It's hard to do well as single box opener, but a glut of product does make for an appetizing secondary card market.
I will say that the Flawless cards, by and large, look really dang good. They had better for the amount of money that they cost. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, I thought that I would put together one of the soccer autograph sets with a clean design, on-card autographs, and a good checklist. The resulting effort was the Flawless Finishes set, with a few examples below. I really do think the cards look nice, but I don't know if I'd do it again, given the astronomical buy-in for some of the bigger names. Can't beat the look of the cards, though. It's one of the few sets that I ended up going with any # parallel instead of the base cards /25, since it appears that a significant amount of this product wasn't opened, and some of the cards just took forever to hit the open market.
Who benefits when this super-premium content is released? Besides the card manufacturing companies, you could argue that group breakers do well with these issues, as people are willing to gamble for big dollar hits, and it's easier to sell group breaks with only a few slots per box. It's hard to do well as single box opener, but a glut of product does make for an appetizing secondary card market.
I will say that the Flawless cards, by and large, look really dang good. They had better for the amount of money that they cost. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, I thought that I would put together one of the soccer autograph sets with a clean design, on-card autographs, and a good checklist. The resulting effort was the Flawless Finishes set, with a few examples below. I really do think the cards look nice, but I don't know if I'd do it again, given the astronomical buy-in for some of the bigger names. Can't beat the look of the cards, though. It's one of the few sets that I ended up going with any # parallel instead of the base cards /25, since it appears that a significant amount of this product wasn't opened, and some of the cards just took forever to hit the open market.
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