Welcome back to Stacking Slabs. This is your hobby content alternative. I am Brett. Hopefully, you are enjoying everything that is being put out on the Stacking Slabs network. I am having a blast scaling content here at Stacking Slabs, putting new formats and shows together, trying to think strategically about creating collector focused content in niche pockets of our hobby.

I'm a big believer that the more we dig into specific categories and bring together passionate collectors and educate and enable those collectors on everything that's happening and resonate with those collectors, the stronger our hobby will be. And that's my goal, really, with what I'm working on in 2026. I've been waiting for a time to put a couple episodes together. We are in a very interesting time in our hobby where we're saying goodbye to one manufacturer, and we're saying hello to another. There's a lot that goes into that.

A lot is being shared, being pushed out, being marketed to us as collectors during this transition. And I have been thinking a lot about putting together a couple episodes. And the first episode is what you're getting today, and this is a recap of the Panini era. Trying to get some understanding of during this run, what happened in the industry? What did collectors gravitate to?

What did we maybe not like so much? Wanna set the stage. So often in life when something new happens, we forget about the past, and we forget to recognize where we just were or what we were just doing. So I want to talk about Panini and the Panini era in this episode. Tomorrow, on the flagship episode of Stacking Slabs, we are going to be talking about the transition.

What this transition from Panini to Fanatics slash Tops really means. I wanna tell you how the next episodes are connected because they're meant to be listened to together. This episode is not about what's coming next. It's about what just happened. We're standing at a real transition point in the hobby.

These licenses are changing. The companies are changing. Conversation everywhere is about the future. I think it's really important to talk about this change, but I also think we should slow down a little bit. This episode is about the Panini Air, not products, not hype, although we'll probably get into products a little bit and probably get into hype, but how the hobby grew, accelerated, and quietly quietly trained collectors during this time because you can't understand where you're going until you understand what you're carrying with you.

This episode is meant to help you recognize patterns, not make decisions. What I wanna do is get into today's episode, but also maybe preview tomorrow. So tomorrow, I'm gonna be talking about how collectors can think clearly during this transition, how to avoid letting something outside of your control change the way you collect. But before we get there, we gotta talk about Panini. There's been a ton of conversation dialogue across social, in hobby circles, at shows about this change, and most of it is forward looking.

I'm not sure I have heard anyone really slow down and look backwards and ask a simple question? And that simple question is what actually just happened? Not in terms of products or releases or corporate moves, but in terms of the hobby itself, how it changed, how it grew, how it trained us. So in this episode, I wanna document the Panini era, not to praise it blindly, not to tear it down, but to understand it because you can't really step into the new era of the hobby without understanding the one that shaped you. And that's how we got there.

When Panini entered the American sports card market, it did so in a serious way. The hobby looked very different than it does today. Information moved a lot slower. There wasn't necessarily the proliferation of content in the hobby. There were message boards, but there wasn't really Instagram.

The communication was very slow. Attention wasn't constant. Collecting still happened largely private. There wasn't the access to, digital conversation like it is today. You know, we bought cards, you sorted cards, and you built sets or player runs often without an audience, watching every move you made.

There were releases, but they didn't dominate the calendar like they do today. There were hits, but they didn't dominate the identity of the industry or maybe you as the collector today. The hobby had a rhythm, and for better or worse, it also had limits. And I think that context matters because in the Panini era, it didn't just add new products. It really changed the tempo of collecting itself.

When Panini took over the major licenses, most notable notably NBA and NFL, they didn't just bring cards to market. They brought a new visual language, thinking about Prism in particular. It became a cultural reset, a new clean design, a new chrome finish, a base card that maybe wasn't premium or felt premium at first, now feels very much premium and an anchor of this era. Color parallels became instantly recognizable. And for the first time in a long time, modern cards felt very cohesive.

They felt intentional. They felt current. Prism made modern collecting legible. You didn't need years of history to understand it. You could see a silver or gold, and you could understand its hierarchy quickly.

And that mattered. It opened the door for new collectors. It made the hobby more accessible. It made it easier to talk about and easier to share and easier to participate in. Panini didn't just modernize cards.

They modernized how collecting looked to an outside world, and that helped push the hobby to the mainstream. And as the Panini era matured, something else happened alongside that design innovation. And that it's one big word, and that's expansion. There's more products, more tiers, more configurations, more parallels, more autographs. That catalog grew wider and deeper at the same time.

There were entry points for almost every budget and taste. There were high end products that felt untouchable. There were mid tier products that became staples. There were lower end products that still carry chase. And on the surface, that looked like a choice, and in many ways, it it was.

But expansion also changed behavior. With more releases came more urgency. With more parallels came more confusion. And with more chase elements came more focus moments instead of meaning. This was also the era where the hobby became something you didn't just do.

It became something you watched. The proliferation of group breaking exploded. Live streams, digital formats turned cards really into events. Big hits became content. Reaction became currency.

And really for the first time, collecting didn't just happen at your desk, at home, at your kitchen table. It happened on screens in real time with an audience. And that opened the hobby to entirely new participants, breakers, content creators, spectators who never touched a card but followed the action closely. Again, this isn't judgment. It's just documentation of what happened and what happened while Panini was in charge.

As all of this was happening, something subtle began to shift inside the collector. Attention began to replace intention. When everything is available all the time, it becomes harder to decide what actually matters. When every release is framed as important, importance itself gets diluted. Rarity becomes easier to manufacture, but desirability becomes harder to define.

Color started to stand for meaning. Serial numbers started to stand for significance, and collectors were trained often unintentionally to react quickly, to chase these windows, to fear missing out. This is where gambling adjacent behavior quickly normalized, not because collectors are reckless, but because systems reward action. Open more, buy faster, stay engaged, don't miss the moment. Over time, the line between collecting and consuming blurred, and most of us didn't even notice it while it was happening.

I think this is the part that's worth sitting in. The Panini era trained collectors. It trained us to think in cycles instead of long arcs. It trained us to measure relevance by visibility. It trained us to equate activity with engagement.

And none of this happened overnight. None of it happened maliciously. It happened because the system worked. Products sold. Attention grew.

The hobby expanded. But growth always comes with trade offs. And one of those trade offs was clarity. Patience. Another was the quiet joy of building something slowly without feeling like you were falling behind.

It's important to say this clearly. The Panini era deserves credit. Prism changed the game. Modern cards became more desirable, and the hobby became mainstream in ways it hadn't in decades. New collectors found their way in.

New voices emerged. New energy flowed through the space. And at the same time, the era also left us with a ton of questions, and I've got those questions. I'm thinking about those questions all the time. And when I have a question, I'm like, is this a piece of content?

Should I explore that? And part of that is the reason why I'm doing today's episode. And some of those questions is, how did we define rarity now? How do we define rarity in an era where one of ones were more available and more present? How do we separate desire from exposure?

Just because something is plastered on digital channels or is propped up by influencers, does this mean that we actually want it? And how do we collect intentionally in a system designed for constant motion? These aren't criticisms. They're consequences and every era leaves its fingerprints. Looking back now with a little bit of distance, although we're still kind of in this moment, it becomes easier to see the patterns for me.

What felt normal at the time was actually training and what felt exciting was actually was also conditioning. What felt like a choice was sometimes pressure. That doesn't mean the era was wrong. It means it was formative. By the time the license changes started getting announced, the collector had already changed.

The hobby didn't suddenly shift. It arrived at a moment it had been moving towards for years. And that's why I wanna do this episode, not to settle scores, not to crown winners or losers, but to mark the moment, to say this is what the Panini era did. This is how it shaped us. This is the environment it created.

And now standing on the edge of something new, we have a choice. We can carry everything forward without reflection, or we can take a deep breath and decide what stays with us. This isn't the end of an era. It's the understanding of one, and understanding is what gives collectors agency again. So I wanna get into some details, some thoughts just in thinking about this episode.

And I gotta be honest, I was very scatterbrained because I wanted to put together something that maybe had a timeline, but also more importantly, these questions that I had it as a collector. And oftentimes with the content that I'm producing, I am sharing my own personal reflection and how I'm absorbing this. And what I've said or how I feel might not be how you feel or how you recognize. But I think it's important in the context of the hobby and the the, the hobby being more diversified than ever before. This is how people who spend a lot of time, energy, resources, and money can think about this era that we are saying goodbye to.

And as I dig into this and I try to get a better understanding of each and every move from a business perspective and how culture began to shape around this industry and hobby, I do think it's important to give Panini credit for being a manufacturer that helped elevate the industry in a way, like we've never seen before. And I'll say this upfront. I've never worked with Panini. Panini is not a sponsor, but I buy a lot of Panini cards. I've spent a ton of money on Panini cards ever since I've been collecting.

And I think it's undeniable to see not only the proliferation of the hobby in main stream media, like cards are everywhere right now. And a big reason for that is what Panini has done to set the stage. Also, during this time, I don't want this episode to be about sales, but we saw more 6 figure and million dollar sales than we've ever before across the entire industry. It's been a while. So I think it's important to dig into kind of the rise of the era and maybe some of the defining milestones.

Panini didn't just take over the licenses. Panini effectively authored a new modern era for doing two things in quick sec succession, acquiring a US legacy manufacturer, which was in Donarus and playoff, and then becoming an exclusive NBA trading partner starting in 2009 and 2010. And that combination mattered to collectors because it fused old hobby brand equity, Donra score playoff with exclusive league legitimacy, and then scaled production to a volume the NBA itself discussed as 15 to 20 products per season. Panini's era is easiest to understand as three overlapping phases that collectors like us actually felt. Panini's arrival and consolidation phase began with Panini's purchase of Donner's playoff in March 2009 and the NBA's decision to make Panini its exclusive global trading card and sticker licensee beginning in the the 02/2010 season.

In collector terms, this was the end of multiple NBA manufacturers' world in the start of a single license cannon for most modern NBA collectors. Panini's innovation and escalation phase is marked by the debut of Prism in 12/13 as the new flagship visual language designed around prismatic parallels in deep rookie class checklists. That same era introduced Select in 2012 and '13 as a premium prism adjacent Chromium product and later created a ladder of ultra premium releases such as Immaculate and Flawless that later marked marketed with briefcase packaging and gym embedded cards and all the high end nature of those cards that we see today. Panini's platformization phase from 2010 onward is defined less by single set and more by the mechanics. You've got Panini rewards and points program positioned itself as a way to reduce reject redemption friction and give collectors more control via a point based marketplace tied to insert insertion and mobile scanning.

Later, this expanded into managed online access via first off first of the off the line products exclusive to Panini's online stores and, direct app, and even introduced auction pricing mechanics for certain high demand direct to consumer launches. Panini's most underappreciated innovation is not a single set. It's the system design, a dense release calendar, product ladders by price tier, and chase mechanics that could scale attention. From the beginning, the NBA exclusive framework envisioned scale. The NBA discussed Panini producing 15 to 20 products a year.

And for collectors, that quantity changed the rhythm of the hobby. It meant you were rarely caught up. You were either choosing a lane or being dragged. Panini era collecting train collectors to think in product lanes. You had entry and mass, which release like hoops, which framed up season kickoffs in affordable access price points while still stuffing boxes with the first appearances of rookie cards, inserts or parallels or autos or memorabilia.

And that format helped light collectors get in without buying the premium tier immediately. It's an access point. It's a gateway. But it normalized the idea that even entry products would contain chase targets. You had the mid tier and flagship, which Prism and then later optic, taught collectors that flagship isn't just base design.

It's the shared culture of parallels, rarity signaling, and the community agrees in the standard of a rookie representation. When we think about the honest rookie card, we think about his 2013 prism. And that doesn't just happen overnight. That takes intention, that takes systematic behavior by the manufacturer, takes promotion, it takes marketing, it takes voices of collectors in the community. And all of this put in a pot and mixed together gets shape Prism to what it is today.

Panini itself framed Prism as a major new product with gold prisms, later black prisms, and it quickly expanded the hobby verse expanded into the hobby, and then it went on to become one of the biggest products that this era has ever seen. You also had premium and ultra premium. We've got flawless, immaculate, and they were marketed as a spectacle, and there was craftsmanship to it with a briefcase presentation and game worn material. Maybe not always game worn material, but we always wanted more game worn material. And these releases felt elegant.

They felt unmatched, and this created an emotional updraft in the collector psyche. Even if you never bought it, you learned what the ceiling looks like and how desire gets manufactured. Panini's chase design did three distinct jobs. It created shared rituals, case hits, short prints, inserts. These are the things that individuals are getting pulled into cards by.

The collectors or investors could rally behind these, and it made these rituals camera friendly. Remember, Panini's rise occurred during the rise of digital, during the rise of more community oriented ways to connect and collaborate with others in the hobby. And Kaboom is undeniably the cleanest example. Panini described it as a one per case psychedelic chase built to leave an impact. And that's not subtle.

That's explicit design for this is the moment. It created completeness traps and set that feel structurally incomplete without parallels. This maps onto goal gradient effects. People accelerate effort as they perceive they're closer to completing a goal. Parallel rainbow is basically a goal gradient machine.

It created a narrative portability across sports. Once an insert brand becomes culturally durable like Kaboom in downtown, it can be cloned into other products and categories and collectors will chase it because it's a known chase. Collector conversations regularly treat the brand recognition as a point. I don't think you can talk about the Panini era without talking about distribution and access. Panini's access era changed over time.

Hobby and retail differentiation was visible early. Prism's rollout explicitly highlighted differences between hobby and retail versions, including retail exclusive parallels. They trained collectors to hunt across channels and created two distinct collecting economies. You've got the LCS allocation culture versus the retail shelf randomness. Re rewards and points added platform behavior to physical ripping.

Panini positioned the rewards program as a way to reduce the delays around redemption. More control in practice, a new anxiety category. Timing drops, monitoring inventory, and feeling like you're playing a second game. I literally just watched the two twenty twenty five, the last Prism installment of the first off the line in Dutch auctions. Panini States first off the line is only available through its online store or Panini Direct app, and Panini described and Panini described as cyber Monday, Prism basketball first off line launch as a Dutch auction format.

This is a cultural pivot. Rather than buy a product, you win access. And this is seen through other cultures like sneaker culture and a little bit was ripped from there and put into carts. Panini didn't operate in a vacuum. The Panini era overlaps with three macro shifts that changed who entered the hobby and how they behave.

Platform mediated buying and selling, content driven collecting, and then post 2020 surge in transactional intensity. The post 2020 surge, the Panini era products became the default vehicles for modern sports demand. In doing some research for this episode, I came across eBay's own 2021 state of trading card report and described a 142% surge in domestic trading card sales in 2020 and noted millions more cards sold than the pre previous year. EBay later eBay's authentication announcement stated that trading card transaction had hit 2,000,000,000 in the 2021, equal to all of 2020, and that in 2020, a sports trading card was purchased every second. Those numbers are not because Panini caused it, but collector reality is unavoidable because Panini held the exclusive NBA license through September 2025 in the NFL and NFL PA licenses through March and February, the modern NBA and NFL product that new collectors encountered in the boom was overwhelmingly Panini branded.

One of the most revealing Panini era cultural artifacts is the NFLPA Panini Trading Card Index. Both NFLPA and Panini Communications described it as a quarterly ranking of rookies and veterans based on factors including secondary market transactions, overall trading volume, and collectability tied to on field performance and expectation. This matters to collectors because it normalized an implicit truth. Collectors weren't only collecting, but they were also tracking, comparing, and reacting to market signals. Panini didn't invent that, but Panini began to institutionalize it with partnerships with a licensing body that legitimized this layer of participation.

I think it's notable to call out some of the other properties Panini reached during, this era beyond NBA and NFL. And while NBA and NFL defined US Panini era identity, Panini continued expanding and renewing other key properties that mattered to collectors and help explain why Panini became a whole ecosystem, not just a few licenses. Think about NASCAR and Panini announced the release of the first official licensing trading card, set in 2016, and NASCAR's own site framed it as a product rollout with multiple products. UFC in January 2021 with a multiyear agreement naming Panini American its official and exclusive global trading partner. Panini's collegiate licensing presence was reinforced during this time frame.

Panini's FIFA relationship remained a core pillar, and FIFA announced its extension in 2023 that kept Panini as FIFA's exclusive partner for stickers, trading cards, trading games, and digital collectibles all under the same agreement. I'm a big wrestling collector, and WWE became a part of this. And I can remember the fear and trepidation of Topps moving over to Panini for wrestling cards, and now wrestling cards are back with Topps. And now this era of wrestling cards in Panini is well it's well beloved and recognized, and this was only a three year stint. Collectors praised Panini for creating modern standards and iconic design Panini's own Prism launch messaging positioned it as a major new addition with distinctive technology and parallel structure, and the hobby media regularly treats Prism as the iconic modern set.

Collectors also praise Panini for the enduring brands that it's created. Think about kabooms. You can't go to any card show or any hobby shop in America without somebody talking about kabooms. On the premium end, Panini's own framing of flawless immaculate is not shy. The way it's positioned, the words that are being used, the messaging, it's meant and intended for high end collectors.

It's not all flowers. There's been plenty of criticism in the Panini era too. I think there's certain categories for that friction. Collectors criticize the overproduction and print run creep, especially around beloved case hits. Whether every claim is correct is less important than what it reveals.

Reveals. Collectors fear their time and money are being poured into an expanding pool where the finish line keeps moving. Collectors criticize access and drop unpredictability with rewards and points. They criticized the emotional effect of substitution currency. Panini's own rewards messaging positions points as a way to replace redemptions and allow collectors to obtain available cards immediately.

But long running discussions across social media and message boards show the opposite reaction exists too. Collectors argued about point fairness, point cards, specificity in the sense of being shortchanged relative to the magic of pulling the actual hit itself. They've criticized quality control, operational mishaps because they've because they've threatened trust even when mishaps are accidental. Panini's legacy issues feed directly into the tops and fanatics takeover narrative. Topps and Fanatics era is already marketing itself as an upgrade to the collector experience.

Fanatics' acquisition of Topps in January 2022 positioned Topps as the key asset to serve collectors and fans globally. The NBA's October 2025 announcement of the Topps return to NBA NBA PA exclusive license emphasized fully licensed NBA cards and launched a new authenticity program tied to game word patches and explicitly attempting to turn memorabilia authenticity into a core pillar of modern collecting. Collectors should hear that correctly. Topps and Fanatics is not merely taking licenses. It's taking aim at the exact pain points that became culturally loud in the Panini era.

Trust, authenticity, and access, and a narrative clarity. I wanna close out this episode by talking about psychology because you can't really have a episode on stacking slabs like this without digging into psychology at some level. And we're gonna start with Russell Belk, who is a American business academic. We're gonna start with his theory of extended self and this framework, and it argues possessions are a major contributor to and reflections of identity. And for collectors, the Panini era wasn't a manufacturer.

It was the era in which they became a collector or the era in which their collecting matured into an adult identity. That's why debates about Prism versus everything else often feel personal. I know I have shared that because I got back into cards, and Prism was the brand. And it served a void for me, and it became an escape, and it became my life, and it became my hobby, and it became what I did for work. It became everything.

So there's a lot of personal feeling that goes into that. And you're not debating a set. You're defending a piece in your collecting timeline. And this is why nostalgia spikes at transitions. Even collectors who criticize Panini for years can feel grief when an era ends because the era contains autobiographical memory where you were, who you collected with, what you chased, what you learned.

And newer research shows collecting is often motivated by a desire for control because collections provide structure. The motivating effect changes when structure seeking is hindered or when collections feel far from completion. This maps perfectly onto the Panini era because Panini did two opposite things at the exact same time. It gave collector structure through stable flagship brands, Prism, Nt, Optic, and recognizable Chase brands, Kaboom and Downtown. It also hindered structure through product proliferation and parallel explosion.

The tension is the emotional signature of this era. Collectors felt both oriented and trapped. FOMO has been brought up a lot on stacking slabs content recently. I went a long time without trying to mention it, but I can't help but mention it in this transition. It validates measurement based and is associated with lower need satisfaction and higher social media engagement.

Panini's most era defining chase concepts are socially optimized. They create shareable wins. Social sharing then amplifies the feeling that you're missing out what others are experiencing. And many listeners of this show look at Kaboom prices and say, those are crazy. They're mass produced.

How are they doing this? But we don't take the time to realize we are so deep in the weeds and integrated into this community. We don't understand all the time that the kaboom is created to bring more people in. And aren't we all looking for growth? More collectors, more people, more demand?

I'm not here to defend the kaboom. Sure. There's plenty that I don't agree with, but when I look at it, I will never collect this these cards. But there's a reason, there's a purpose, and there's intention behind how they've gotten to where they've been. And goal gradient research often offers another layer.

People accelerate effort as they approach a reward. Rainbow chase, set completion, just need the last gold in a run. This chase built in goal gradient engine. The closer you get, the harder it pulls you in. Collectors definitely overvalue their era.

I know I'm representing this era, and I probably overvalue it a little bit. When a collector hears Panini's done, their brain doesn't simply register a change. It registers a loss in familiarity, language, competence, especially for collectors who leaned in this hobby through Panini's rules. The endowment effect also explains why collectors value what they already own because they own it and why they may resist new products even when they're curious. This is not irrational.

It's human. It's also why Panini era will likely be a mythology after it ends. People protect identity by protecting the era that formed them. If you want to place Panini's historically without turning your thoughts about what they're doing into, an emotional conversation, there's a way to look at this as a third modern revolution. You've got the junk wax era is which is widely described in the eighties and nineties as overproduction that flooded supply and devalued most material.

Tops itself defines this as a period where manufacturers flooded the market and created supply demand imbalance. In the late nineties, Chromium Revolution introduced durable, premium visual design. Tops Chrome debut in '96. The early two thousands, luxury revolution with exquisite, normalized high end patch autograph collecting. Panini's revolution is the system revolution.

Parallels as the identity. Case hits as the ritual, direct to consumer drops at events, digital adjacency became normalized, and attention as a core currency. There is a lot to be said about the Panini era. There is going to be a lot more to be said, but I felt compelled to put some sort of artifact out there to document this and what I'm thinking about this right now as a creator in the space. Panini built the modern hobby grammar, flagship parallels, case hits, premium ladders, platform behaviors.

The tops and fanatics era is inheriting that grammar and claiming it can improve the collector experience using credibility like authenticity programs and game word patches. We're going to talk about this transition in Wednesday's flagship episode. We're gonna talk about it from the perspective of how this impacts and what this means for us as the collector. And it should especially resonate if you're a collector like me who's been collecting cards very intimately, very passionately in this Panini era. I know I've had fun collecting Panini cards, and I don't have any plans to stop collecting Panini cards even though, they are no longer making cards in the licenses that I collect in.

But so it goes. The hobby changes. It's rapid. It evolves. But I thought this would be fun to document and put it together.

What do you think? What's your opinion? Are you thinking these sort of things, or are you just taking everything you're hearing at face value? Hopefully, this episode helps. You're going to wanna stick around to the flagship episode tomorrow.

It's coming out. If you're listening to this on launch day, I can't wait to share it with you. Thank you so much for supporting Stacking Slabs, your hobby content alternative. Talk to you soon.