Panini’s Black Friday Starting To Shape Up

By Stephen Laroche | Beckett Basketball Editor

We are barely a week away from the biggest shopping weekend of the year and collectors are gearing up for Panini America‘s annual holiday season tradition – their ever-popular Black Friday promotion.

Over the past couple of weeks, the company has been leaking out details about their 2014 Panini America Black Friday promotional set and packs are expected to loaded with cards that are sure to be heavily chased and may even become the cornerstones of some collections.

Starting on Friday, November 28, collectors will converge on hundreds of their favorite card stores in order to participate in the program and bust some packs or they can visit iCollectPanini.com if they do not have a hobby shop that is participating in the program. Naturally, there is an opportunity to pull autographs and memorabilia along with tough parallels from the worlds of baseball, basketball and football.

What does Panini America have planned for hobbyists on Black Friday? Find out after the jump.

The base set will be made up of 65 total cards that are broken up into 21 current star players and 29 rookie performers (#’d to 499) to go along with some very limited Memorabilia Rookie Cards that have only 99 copies made for each. Some of these cards will also have autographed versions, too, and there are some huge names to be found.

The base set cards will also be replicated in eye-catching Cracked Ice and Lava Flow parallels. These will be limited to just 25 and one copy each respectively, but the parallel versions of the memorabilia and autographs will not be numbered. However, the Cracked Ice will have 25 copies or less and the Lava Flow will be to 10 or less.

The memorabilia card program is loaded up with compelling content that focuses on the NBA’s brightest rookies along with cards looking at NFL initiatives such as Breast Cancer Awareness and Salute to Service. As expected, there will also be some Happy Holidays memorabilia cards of players wearing Santa Claus hats – a Panini tradition.

Additional autograph content will also be found in packs, but Panini has only teased a few additional sets such as Black Friday Autograph Patches and a Happy Holidays autographed memorabilia parallel.

Non-memorabilia inserts are also a major part of the Black Friday promotion and the Panini Collection cards have become a favorite of many due to their slick design and carefully selected images. The autographed versions should be huge with player collectors as well and will be tough to chase down.

Expect more details about Panini’s 2014 Black Friday promotion to surface in the days leading up to release.

Stephen Laroche is the editor of Beckett Basketball and Beckett Hockey magazines. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an e-mail to him at slaroche@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter @Stephen_Laroche.