Rush of gold

Today Panini released a video of the first of their golden ticket cards from 2010 Playoff contenders being redeemed in person. The Mark Sanchez variation of the card was redeemed by Dallas-area collector Michael Keller yesterday. In the video Tracey Hackler (marketing manager for Panini America) also confirms that the Troy Aikman, and Brett Favre variations of the solid gold have also been redeemed, added to this are new listings for the Eli Manning and Chris Johnsons on eBay. The Eli Manning card being the only one with the fixed price, listed at $1,500. At time of writing the highest bid for the Aaoron Rodgers was at $2,025, with 3 and a half days left on the auction. Though the design on the cards may be reasonably simplistic, the idea of owning some of the first solid gold football cards appears to be driving the prices sky high. Below is the video post on Panini America's blog.

2 down in two days

A few hours after writing a post in which I talked about the first golden ticket being found it turns out that another one has been discovered by a member of the blowout cards forum. With the Aaron Rodgers being found yesterday, today the Mark Sanchez version has been pulled. The member is intending on redeeming the card at Panini headquarters tomorrow, so hopefully we wont have to wait too long to get a proper scan of one of these cards. Until then this will have to do.

Hobby Gold! (and diamond and erm... pujols)

This just my round-up and opinion on some of the hobby news stories that have broken over the last day or two.

First up as many of you will be aware Topps diamond card give-away has been launched, giving people a chance to collect and trade classic cards from the last 60 years of Topps baseball. The giveaway also gives people a chance to win Topps diamond rings and 1/1 cards that have diamonds embedded in the cards. Within a few hours of the giveaway starting people are already reporting having redeemed one of the diamond embedded cards, the first collector with proof posted this to the blowout cards forum. I personally love the idea of the giveaway, and it adds a level of ease to trading that us overseas collectors aren't used to.

Today Panini announced that collectors will be able to collect real gold cards from this years incarnation of playoff contenders football. The cards will be inserted into packs in the form of redemptions to stop the cards becoming damaged, and one would assume to stop people pack searching the packs for incredibly valuable cards. There are 52 cards that feature veterans as well as rookies. Panini have also released details that there are in fact short printed variations of the rookie on card autogrhs the product is famous for, however information how limited these short prints are hasn't been released to the public. A more accurate description of the gold cards and a box break of playoff contenders can be seen below.

And finally topps has announced today that they will be inputting buybacks for the highly sort after Albert Pujols rookie auto into packs of  2011 Tribute Baseball. There will be 30 buybacks, each of the buybacks will be good for one of the following cards.

• 2001 Bowman Chrome Autograph

• 2001 Topps Finest Autograph 

• 2001 Topps Reserve Autograph

It may just be a ploy to get people to buy one of their least popular products, but it has the looks of a ploy that may just work on a lot of collectors.