2015 Panini Gridiron Kings Football Cards

Pretty solid product. Love the design for sure!

After killing it with Diamond Kings this past summer, I was jacked to grab snared 3 boxes of Gridiron Kings. And, yes, while it is a rookie heavy release, a well-curated roster of veteran signers also made it into the product.

So. I pulled a nice but nothing-special T. Yeldon auto /50, a sweet Sammie Coates 2/C-3 break jumbo patch /25, a nifty-keen Jameis Winston 1C auto-patch /25, a Jay Ajayi 1/C swatch /”Can’t Count That High”, and the real show-stopper… an Amari Cooper 3/C-4 break auto patch /10. Man. That’s a really neat card, a PC kinda card, and I didn’t drop a bundle to pull it.
And therein lies the real appeal of GKings and its sister product, Diamond Kings; they offer unique and significant cards of thein memorabilia cards, and therefore are a ton o’ cardboard fun to open! Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman, Jerry Rice, Joe Montana, Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders, Kurt Warner, Earl Campbell, Gayle Sayers, Jerome Bettis, Tom Brady, Richard Sherman…I’m out of breath here. Coupled with a historically significant SuperBowl signature subset and a full suite of rookie mem’, autographed and “patchified” … I find Gridiron Kings to be a contender for “product of the year” honors.

I was really looking forward to this product but my initial impression is that it failed to live up to my expectations. I bought 4 boxes. The cards have a cool look and feel to them. However, I really don’t like the different colors of framed cards, none of which are serial numbered except for the black 1/1. In Diamond Kings (the baseball companion product to Gridiron Kings), you typically got two different color frames. One was not serial numbered and the other was serial numbered to 99. Here, you get three different colors of framed cards and none of them are serial numbered. So each pack usually has 3 framed cards with no serial numbers. This might have some utility if you can get a “rainbow” of framed cards of a top rookie, star player or Hall of Famer, but then again, you will always need the black 1/1 to complete the rainbow. I don’t need 3 different color frame cards of a mid-level star, none of which are serial numbered. It seems like overkill to me.

So, it became clear very quickly that the hits were going to have to bring a lot of value to make up for the fact that there are not a lot of interesting parallels in the regular set. (That being said, I did pull a J.J. Watt collegiate photo variation parallel, which seem to be pretty tough, because it was my only one in 4 boxes.)

One of the things I was optimistic about with this set was that the hits would be a good mix of veterans and rookies. It’s a huge auto and relic checklist with many veterans and retired stars in both. Even though I know those will be in more limited numbers than the rookies, I was hoping to get at least a couple non-rookie hits in my boxes. Of course, I know 4 boxes is a small sample size, but out of my hits I only got one non-rookie. It was a jersey relic card of Andy Dalton. The jersey piece was very small (much smaller than the jersey pieces of the rookies).

One of my boxes was missing an auto. Panini’s quality assurance is very good and when this has happened to me in the past, they have send me a replacement card within a few weeks. Still, with a brand new product, it is annoying to have to go through the trouble of filling out a claim online and mailing them the info, etc., just to get the auto that was supposedly guaranteed in my box.

My autos were of Todd Gurley, Tyler Lockett and Sammie Coates. Pretty good rookie names. My jersey cards were of Marcus Mariota (a really nice jumbo patch serial numbered to 49), Maxx Williams and Bryce Petty in addition to the Dalton.

Obviously I was happy to get the Gurley and Mariota cards. I was hoping for a better distribution of non-rookie hits (maybe just bad luck of the draw in my 4 boxes), I was annoyed with the missing auto, and I was disappointed by the numerous unnumbered frame cards. Overall, I give it 3 stars because I think the price point is good for 2 hits a box with the potential of getting many great names. It’s just not as much of a homerun as it could have been, in my opinion.

Could be the steal product of the year. Good price range and some nice looking cards. The stickers look awful but if it keeps down the price I don’t mind it so much. It’s when they have over $100 price tag and are full of stickers. I’m hoping to buy this for Panini’s black friday promotion or my LCS small business Saturday or Cyber Monday deals.