2013 Pinnacle - First Look

Although they apparently didn't get the Leaf Brand when they bought out Donruss, Panini apparently did get the Pinnacle Brand.  When I saw that there would be 2013 Pinnacle I thought of nice, full-bleed printed cards with lots of parallels and inserts. 2 out of 3 ain't bad.

I picked up 4 packs at Target at $2.99 per 8-card pack. Not terribly expensive but certainly a higher end card than Panini Triple Play (another 1990's brand brought back to life).

I'm pretty disappointed in the cards, both from a design standpoint and a photograph selection standpoint.

First off, the design. Really, black cards?  Black can certainly be a bold design point. Perhaps Panini was striving to recapture the look and feel of the very first Pinnacle sets from 1992 and 1993. These had black borders but unlike the 2013 reincarnation, they weren't drab.

What about the photography choices. I got 28 base cards from the 4 packs. All but two of the feature a player batting or a player pitching. When you seen either of these poses, you've pretty much seen the whole set.

Another design point. The team color highlights are so dark they add to the overall drabness of the cards. On some of the cards, the color is so dark, it just fades into the generally blackness.  Here's a pitcher card, and a rookie card.

The Rookie Card logo is the same they used on Panini Prizm. Maybe they were trying to make up for the brightness of that set by making this one so dark.  There were 2 cards featuring fielding plays. Here's one.

It looks just like a pitcher card. So does the other one I got.

There are several parallels to the 200-card set - Artist's Proof (another reincarnation from the '90s), Artist's Proof Blue, and Die-Cut. There is also a 150-card Museum Proof set which, I guess, just covers the non-rookie part of the set. Here's an Artist's Proof. I pulled 2 of them.

I never understood why this parallel, which features a textured multiple-colored foil overlay, was called Artist's Proof. I still don't.

There are a lot of insert cards and I understand there is supposed to be an insert in each pack. Along with the 2 Artist's Proof inserts, I pulled 3 more.

Only 5 cards in this set. By the way, each set comes in the same parallels as the base set. The back of this card is the only non-drab thing I saw.

There are 20 cards in this insert set.

And finally, this.

Clear plastic cards used to be a mainstay of 1990s sets. The card backs can be a bit goofy, though.