That Other Card Purchase: 2012-13 Panini Past And Present Basketball

In the last blog post, I mentioned buying a rack pack of another product and would blog about it at a later date. Well, here is the post I promise. My quasi review/haul post of 2012-2013 Panini Past and Present Basketball. Now, I usually don't buy a lot of basketball cards. I usually spend my sports card money on baseball, football and hockey. But during this past season, during the NHL Players Strike, I started following basketball a lot more closely than I had in recent years and fell in love with my Knicks all over again. Plus, I have watched videos of box breaks of this product so when I saw the rack pack in Target, I grabbed it.

Like Topps Archive Football, Past & Present Basketball has the look and feel of an old school product. However, it doesn't use past card designs like Topps Archive does. Obviously, Panini doesn't have a history like Topps does, but it still has a retro look and feel to it. Like Archive, Past & Present doesn't have the slick gloss that most card products do these days. These cards would be great for autographing. And like Archive, Panini mixes todays players with those from the past.

This set doesn't have a ton of game used cards, which to me is a good thing. The Gamers set returns to this years product and that's pretty much it. I am pretty pleased by this as I would like card companies to concentrate more on giving us some awesome inserts and more autographs.

Speaking of autographs, each hobby box come with 3 autographs per box. For current players, look to pull Modern Marks. If your like me and want to pull some autographs of former players, Elusive Ink is the set you will want. This set focuses on players who don't have a lot of autographs out there, but people will want to chase. Just by looking at the Elusive Inks checklist, I see some autographs I am definitely going to want to chase after.

Now, on to the haul:

The base cards seem to have more than one design

I just realized, Panini does have the NBA Hoops sets. If they have the rights, they could have incorporated past Hoops designs into this product. Unless they do that with Hoops. I really don't know. I haven't picked up any Hoops as of yet.

The rookie cards have a nice design to them.

Yes, I did pull a couple of Knicks in my rack pack

So overall, I like this product a lot. It was a fun quick break. The rack pack had 32 cards inside, but no inserts, which stunk. I have seen some of the inserts like Rise And Shine and Raining 3's and would have love to pulled at least one. But, it's a rack pack. Can't complain too much. I pulled a few nice singles. I will probably get the Knicks team set and chase the inserts, autos and David Lee cards if the price is right. I will say, if I was to buy a box of basketball cards, this would be the product I would buy.