[mid50sbaseball]

Originally Posted by Rookiemonster

I thought topps was still going to make cards just not with the nfl uniforms? I haven't been a fan of panini but I'll give them a chance.

Correct...Topps will still be making cards. Whether they will be producing cards with all of the players pictured in college uniforms or if they'll be airbrushing all of the logos out like Panini does in baseball I couldn't say for sure.

In terms of what Panini puts out. Frankly quite a bit. They do have a few...what I would call "core products" that they do every year though that might be worth looking into in terms of set building.

If you're just looking for a set to put together that would be relatively cheap but have a decent size to it in terms of card count with a lot of different players represented including all of the new rookies, your best bet would probably be the Score set. To my knowledge, they don't release a factory sealed set of this product, however it is a low end product that will consist primarily of just the base cards so hand collating a set would likely not be terribly difficult if you bought a couple boxes of packs. It's one of the few products Panini puts out (maybe the only one?) where the focus is not the "hits"

If you like the idea of doing a rookie autograph set or something along those lines, I'd recommend Contenders.

And if you like the color refractors and parallels made so popular by Topps Chrome, then I'd recommend Panini Prizm (which was basically created specifically to compete with Chrome and has a very similar setup with all of the colored refractor variations etc.)

hope this helps.

*edit* another note: Panini recently for whatever reason has decided to start releasing two different Contenders products each year and also 2 different Prizm products. The products this year are called "Contenders Draft Picks" and "Prizm Collegiate Draft" all of the cards in these sets feature players in their college uniforms. folks who are big college football fans like them and will go after them, but folks who are more NFL fans will be much better served waiting for the Contenders and Prizm products that release later in the year with players in their NFL uni's.