2020 Panini Prizm Football Set Review and Checklist

The rise of NFL football card popularity continued with the release of 2020 Panini Prizm.  What was once a $200 hobby box is selling for $1,100 “on sale”, and retail packaging is selling for 3-4x the MSRP.  Collector’s continue to gobble up singles on eBay, Sportlots, and COMC.  Here is a look at the product and a few of its features that stand out to me.

The Breakdown

As always, the 400 card 2020 Panini Prizm Football checklist is expansive.  It is made up of 300 current stars and former legends, as well as 100 rookies.  Traditionally, the depth of the Prizm checklist made this one of the best football sets to collect for set builders.  It offers a great combination of quality and variety and was a great historical record of that year’s football season.  It is still a very nice product, however, the prices on the secondary market make it an expensive endeavor if you want to try and build the full 400 card set.

In addition to the base cards, there are 13 different insert sets as part of this release.

As I recently discussed with D.J. Kazmierczak, Panini’s VP of Sales and Product Development, the increasing popularity of parallels has allowed for increasing production while still adding value to the product without increasing the number of autograph and relic assets needed.  2020 Prizm delivers no shortage of parallels.  By my count there are approximately 35 different base card parallels spread across a variety of hobby and retail packaging.  They range from several unnumbered colors to 1/1s.  Several of the insert sets also have parallels with varying levels of scarcity.

Another way Panini added “non-hit” value was through 25 rookie base card photo variations.  While a nice addition, they don’t seem to carry quite the same weight with collector’s on the secondary market.  For example, despite being more limited than the base card, the Joe Burrow variation is selling for around $60 while his standard base card is selling for around $75.  The rookie quarterback class is also driving up some good value.  In addition to Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, and Jalen Hurts are carrying strong prices on eBay.

Autographs are still a strong driver of demand of the product, and despite the difficulty in obtaining autographs due to COVID, Panini was still able to acquire a staggering number of auto for the release.  There are hundreds of different autographed cards, with many of them having a variety of numbered and unnumbered parallels.  In addition, a small number of relic cards are randomly inserted, but let’s be real.  It’s the autographs and base card parallels that really drive the demand for this product.

Checklist: I recommend visiting Beckett.com for the full checklist

Box Break

I was fortunate that one of my friends found several mega boxes for sale at a big box store, and he thankfully sold a few to me at MSRP!  Paying about $50 a box is much better than paying the $120 or so they are selling for on the secondary market.  

Here’s what my break looked like!

Wow, I couldn’t be happier with how this turned out!  Getting two of the top three rookies in Herbert and Tua was fantastic, and the CeeDee Lamb parallel was great value too.  Some have complained about the quality of autograph subjects in the retail packaging, but the Villanueva has a pretty strong resale value based on eBay comps.  I snagged a couple cards for the PC, took the big rookies to the Shop, and put the rest of the base on Sportlots!

Wrapping it up

This product looks fantastic, and the variety of base and insert cards continue to make this a great release.  However, it seems expensive at current prices.  That being said, the singles prices are also quite strong, so if you open and sell quickly, you may still do alright even if you don’t hit any of the big names.  Personally, I’m a bit disappointed that putting the full set together won’t be in the cards this year, but I’m still happy to pick up a few of my favorite players here and there.  If you can find retail packaging at MSRP, I would definitely recommend this as a product to buy and have some fun with!