2011 Panini Rookies and Stars

This product is about as consistent as it gets. Everyone knows just about what to expect and it came out right as the lockout ended making it hotter than normal. It's got much more hype than any other year I can remember.

Price Paid: $84.95
Sale Value (on ebay): $80.00 (week of release)

Design: The base is clean and white and resembles SP Authentic. Not collectible as a set, but decent enough to keep your team's players. The rookies beat the heck out of the Prestige design, but they generally use the same photographs from the combine. Weak photography makes the base rookies much less appealing. Everyone knows R&S is famous for the manufactured NFL team patch autographs. I personally like these cards and they are the same old thing with new players. They also brought back the same old jumbo jersey cards which I'm not a huge fan of because of the "event worn" deal. The Studio Rookies and Dress For Success and Freshman Orientation took a dive this year as the posed smiling pictures make it seem like they are male models and not athletes. The Rookie Revolution cards are somewhere in the middle, not great, but not poor. Finally, the veteran options are the Prime Cuts and Statistical Standouts both of which are very well put together and desirable for any collector. There's some hit and miss in here, but there's more hits. 3.5/5

Checklist: They boast a 130 rookies base list which is always fun for most collectors. There are also four different parallel levels which are fun to hunt for (no 1/1 base, woohoo!). You have a good shot at pulling at least two or three good rookie cards with the Dress For Success being the only dollar-bin type hit. The manufactured autographs are the feature here, so if you do not like them, AVOID this product. There are 50 different players to pull which gives a wide variety of nice hits there. It's always tough to break a box of this and not get at least one good hit. 4.5/5

Fun: About half of the packs will have an insert or hit making it a good ratio. The break will go by in about 5-10 minutes and will probably leave most feeling satisfied. There's very little suspense, but a decent shot at a one-card box savior. In the end, it's the standard 24 packs with 4 hits. 3/5

What I got:

24 base rookies

2 longevity parallel /249 (Jahvid Best, Aaron Rodgers)

1 longevity parallel /99 (DeSean Jackson)

1 longevity parallel /49 (Sidney Rice)

2 studio rookie /500 (Rudolph, Green)

2 rookie revolution /500 (Titus Young, Von Miller)

auto /300 (Cameron Jordan)

patch /50 (Donald Driver)

freshman orientation jersey /299 (Andy Dalton)

Freshman Orientation auto jersey /50 (jonathan baldwin)

Overall/Value: I think my break is a great example of this product. It had excellent value, but I must mention my other buys were weeks after the initial release and this one was on time (except Score). The values of these cards traditionally drop almost in half depending on the player after a month or so. There is really big hit potential though and it's hard to see not making at least half of your money back on a break (at least right now). 4.5/5

My Break/Tilt: The best looking card I got was the Driver and it is the least valuable. It is just a base card with a 2 color patch inserted. I missed hitting the manufactured patch auto and still came out pretty well. Anyone hitting those early on are making good cash off of this. 4/5

Overall: 19.5/25 C