General Forum

So, I have come to grips with the fact Panini isn't offering a Complete set this year.  Actually, I never saw this posted or announced anywehere, I am just assuming this is true since they would have been out by now and also, I do not see a release date for them.  This frustrates me, because since I got back in the hobby, I found this to be a very enjoyable set to collect.  The Donruss and Hoops sets look nice, but don't have as many cards and are slightly more expensive to collect.  The Complete set had a lot of great players, a great look and was at a great price point.  Sure, the backs were standard Panini, which means they stunk, but with Panini cornering the market, it was one of the better sets to collect.

Does anyone know what happened to it, why they decided to get rid of it, and what if anything they are replacing it with or that is similar.  I am stuck trying to determine what basketball set to collect this year.  I started Donruss, but the set is so small.

They got rid of it because they are really, really inept this year. A shame, as they were actually doing good last year. It looks like Hoops might be the best bet this season, with 290 of the NBA's 525 players. Disgraceful.

Isn't it about time that somebody points out that monopolies are illegal?

If the US government actually cared about such things, they would have been all over Topps 8 years ago. Same thing for Beckett. Hell, AT&T has been busted up by them once before (back in the late 1990's), but they are buying up companies like everything is going out of style. If it wasn't for T-Mobil, Verizon and Sprint, AT&T would have the whole market on phone service again. Funny thing is that Sprint was originally busted off of AT&T, as were most of the phone companies that AT&T has re-bought since then. AT&T also bought DirecTV a couple of years ago. Them and Comcast seem to be buying everything TV media-related now. Comcast is swallowing up cable companies at a rapid rate.

Last one: in central NC, there is NO option on who provides your electricity. It is Duke Energy or nothing! (unless you can afford solar panels or wind turbines) Other parts of the state have co-operatives to provide power, but not the most populous parts of the state. On top of that, Duke Energy is poisoning the land around all of their facilities with coal ash and other crap. The state has finally taken action against them for that part, but still isn't doing anything about the monopoly.

It's the same with our power company. Only choice available.

Don't forget Press Pass had the first exclusive license, back in 2001.

That stinks, I didn't know Complete wasn't coming out this year.  I remember last year I had read nothing about the release online at all, but I still ended up seeing it on the shelf at Target.  I was hoping it would end up being the same situation this year.

I don't know what it is about basketball cards this season, it just doesn't feel the same for some reason.  I bought a hobby box of both Hoops and Donruss which I liked, but I was a little let down by Prizm this year.  The cards were extremely hard to find (my local shop didn't even order any because of the high price this year), the checklist included coaches (which I find silly for a higher end set that only has 4 cards per pack) and some of the cards actually had some sort of weird residue on them out of the pack.

The Panini Ascencion looks pretty cool, but I am not a big fan of boxes where you don't get many cards compared to what you pay.  This is the reason I don't even consider buying those sets like Court Kings etc.  Also it looks like a lot of the cards have the rookies in college jerseys.  Otherwise I like the graphics on them, but I probably still won't buy any.  

Still happy that Prestige will be coming out later this year, but haven't heard anythng yet about Threads.