Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Panini Auditions the Chronicles


A look at Panini Chronicles through the lens of a @midwestboxbreak team break. 

Panini Chronicles is a weird beast. In basketball, it seems to be Panini's attempt to cram all of their past designs that didn't make it to one of the many sets in their release calendar all in one gargantuan set just to throw something like 15 more Luka Doncic rookie cards at you. In baseball, it just feels like a weird audition for a license they'll probably never have.

Look at all of these baseball cards we could be making! Just give us a chance!

I bought into a break over at Midwest Box Breaks for the first time and got a variety of Cardinals stuff from the set, enough to whet my appetite for Panini weirdness.


I'm not sure if Phoenix is a new concept or something they acquired when they bought up other brands. I don't recall ever seeing Phoenix cards until they landed in Chronicles this year. These get the Chrome-style treatment.


Ditto for Obsidian. Has anyone seen these before? Apparently there is an Obsidian NBA set forthcoming(?). Anyway, these are thick, dark, refractor-y and generally look cool (except the whole no logos thing.)


Status is a newer Panini brand for their NBA sets. This looks almost exactly like the current basketball set, except for the weird block letter team designation where the team logo normally would be.


I think Titan is new as well. This has more of a weird offbrand minor league prospects set kind of feel to it, to its detriment.


On the plus side, the Titan cards do have the Chrome... er, sorry... Prizm finish to them. That leaves them open for Prizm style parallels like this one, which is numbered to 199.

All in all, it's not bad, although I don't feel like this ever made it to retail so I may not see much more of it.

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