2019 Panini Absolute Football Forum

How can one tell the difference, if any, between hobby and retail versions of this product?

Can anyone who has opened this product explain the difference between retail, hobby, and spectrum?

From what I can assess:

Hobby base 1-100 are spectrum, 101-200 are spectrum /199.

Retail base 1-100 are regular non-foil cards, 101-200 are foil cards.

The DB currently has a regular set and a spectrum set, and to me, that's two hobby sets. Spectrum should be base hobby, and a retail set needs to be added.

Thoughts?

Based on what they've done with Absolute (both Panini and Playoff/Donruss) in the past, a holofoil coating on the entire front would be the Hobby version (also called Spectrum by Panini) and the non-holofoil will be retail. Rookies would have holofoil on both but only the hobby version will have an SN.

Edit to add that I have not opened any, but that's how it's been done for many years now and I don't see why they'd change it. Except in NASCAR where hobby and retail base cards were all the same in the 2017 release (the only Absolute NASCAR release so far).

So I've confirmed what I mentioned earlier to be correct.

The hobby 'base' set is all spectrum cards which are currently listed on TCDB as a parallel. And every image that's listed in the base set are actually retail cards. The sets need to be swapped.

Retail box breaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWcRZ2xv1jc

Hobby box breaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ7Y7AzWfY

A heads up for anyone with this set: we're currently in the process of swapping Hobby Spectrum to base and the current plain white base to Retail, just in case you see your collection numbers jump around. Please do not fill anything into the base checklist or Retail parallel until we've completed our updates. Thanks!

Good news .... the swap of Hobby to base and Retail to parallel is complete!

If you have these cards in your collections, check to make sure they're marked correctly.

Please do not upload any images to the base checklist unless they're the Hobby holofoil version. Thanks!