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 there are two releases expected with 2023 Topps Luminaries and 2023 Panini Flawless Baseball.
This post will be updated if more news, product information and/or product drops occur throughout the week.
2023 Topps Luminaries
The high-end product from Topps is scheduled to release on Wednesday, February 7th.
There is only one configuration - a regular Hobby box. Each Hobby box comes with a single card and if it’s a standard card, it will be encased. Booklets are typically not encased. Currently Blowout is selling Hobby boxes for $379.95. Last year Topps sold Hobby boxes for $349.99. ***Update - Topps is selling Hobby boxes for the same price as last year - $349.99, with a customer limit of 4 boxes. They are selling Cases of Hobby boxes (12 boxes per case) for $4,099.99 with a customer limit of 2 cases.
The design is likely standard Luminaries, but we don’t have the base design in the marketing material - we instead have a blue parallel. I imagine where the blue is in the Mike Trout auto in the header image will be the standard Luminaries white, and they we have the black/dark gray theme along with the traditional Luminaries gold accents. As usual, Luminaries highlights the stats for the players signing cards - for example, a hit kings card will show how many career hits a player has at the moment if active or the career total for retired players. New this year are on leather autos where game-used baseballs will be signed by the players that either hit or pitched the ball. Those are traditionally dangerous territory because the leather can soak in the ink, but manufacturers have done better recently with this, so hopefully that’s not an issue here. I get nervous every time I see it, though. Autos are almost all on card with the exception of the occasional huge multi-player booklets that are usually found in this product.
The checklist is yet to be released, but it typically runs pretty equally between rookies, vets, and retired players. While the checklist is usually really good, the single card per box and high price point make easily half the checklist a small to huge disappointment to pull. A $350 - $400 box can end up giving you one card that could sell for $50 or less which is a tough pill to swallow.
Of the various high-end products from Topps, this is one of my least favorite. I’m not a big fan of the stat theme, especially how large they make the numbers. I don’t really need to know that Ronald Acuña Jr. had a .416 OBP last year, at least not on the front of his baseball card. I also don’t like the one card only gamble. This product is an easy pass every year.
2023 Panini Flawless Baseball
The highest end Panini baseball product, 2023 Panini Flawless Baseball is scheduled to release on Wednesday, February 7th.
There is a single Hobby format - a regular Hobby box. In years past, there was also a 1st Off The Line format, but I did not see one this year. I could have easily missed it, but I can’t imagine there would have been the demand for it give the checklist changes for Panini baseball products. The Hobby box is actually a briefcase that contains one mini box of 8 cards plus 2 encased gem cards - typically one relic auto and one relic for those encased cards. For the 8 cards in the mini box, it usually breaks down as 2 relic cards and 6 autos. Currently Blowout is selling boxes for $1,999.95. Last year Panini sold boxes for $1,499.95. ***Update - 1st Off The Line (FOTL) versions are in hands and part of breaks, so I guess I did miss a Dutch Auction, or perhaps it just never went to auction and it went straight to distributors (most likely I missed the Dutch Auction). Shouldn’t be anything different other than a couple of exclusive, low numbered parallels. *****Update - Panini is selling regular Hobby boxes for $1,699.95 with a transaction limit of 2.
The design is standard Flawless - primarily white with gold accents that change to other colors depending on the parallel. Autos are pretty much always on card. Relics are often game-used, but I have also seen player-used material here. For a product this expensive, that is pretty much unacceptable, but sadly unsurprising. The main attraction are the gems embedded in the two encased cards that they provide guarantees of authenticity with (at least in the past). However, over the years, there has been a lot of questions around the value of those gems being minimal and not worth the hype that the hobby blindly assigns to them…or perhaps not. I’ve been able to purchase Flawless gem cards (not the auto version) for under $50 in the past.
The checklist is what we’ve seen from Panini all year - prospects that did not debut prior to the 2023 MLB season, Bobby Witt Jr./Seiya Suzuki, and ex-MLB players. Unfortunately in the last half of the year Panini has shown a complete lack of regard for the rookie card logo and they do so again here, putting it on an Elly De La Cruz card in the marketing material. Elly is a 2024 Baseball Card rookie. There are some big name prospects in the set - Jackson Holliday and Jackson Chourio being the two main highlights along with Elly.
I like getting Flawless cards in the secondary market - great looking cards even if they are unlicensed. Fortunately Panini does hold the USA Baseball license, and two of the cards I’ve picked up in the past were players in USA Baseball uniforms. They will again feature players in USA Baseball in the 2023 version. From a box purchasing or even a break situation, I stay away. The box all by itself is ridiculously priced and near impossible to make your money back given the unlicensed nature. Breaks are either hit breaks which probably run close to $200 a spot or random team breaks which right now can be found for $80 a spot with the big breakers like Layton. Those random team breaks seem like a reasonable price, but there is a high likelihood of skunking (not getting a single card) given that there are 30 teams and only 10 cards. And more than one card could end up going to a single team, so it’s not even a 1 in 3 chance of hitting a card - the odds are worse. So if you do like these cards, I would suggest checking the secondary market for them.