Kings of the Diamond

Another #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax features a new crop of Diamond Kings. 

 

Panini's new Diamond Kings set seems to be more of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it offering than in past years. Knowing full well that I won't be seeing any of this stuff on the retail market (which basically doesn't exist anymore), I bought into a break with our good pals at Crackin' Wax.

The design basically looks like last year's set, only with a significant chunk of the border given to a big red space that comes complete with a larger than normal team name. Usually it feels like Panini tries to downplay the team names as much as possible, so they don't get sued or something.

 

Here is what the design looks like with a black and white photo. I'm glad that they didn't try to colorize this.

One of my chief complaints with Diamond Kings is that they tend to reuse the same photos over and over again for the legendary players, but I'm pleased to say that I don't really recognize this one.

It seems like there may be a few more inserts this year, although that could just be that I somehow lucked out and had some pulled for me. There's an insert set for "Debut" Diamond Kings, presumably where a standout rookie/prospect player was chosen for each team in the league. It's kind of fun, and it's still a bit of a nod to the way they'd choose Diamond Kings for the old Donruss sets.

On the other hand, this insert set seems like they just fused a couple of words together that started with the same letter without giving the subject matter any real thought. It's a new Ozzie Smith card for me, though, so that's certainly a positive.

I had the Tigers assigned as one of my random teams, and my allotment included this plum framed parallel of Hank Greenberg. This is where I need to mention that no one has claimed any Tigers cards in my Spring Cleaning extravaganza. This and more could be yours!