2012 Leaf Best Of Football Is Now Live

Following up on the tail of Best of Baseball and Best of Basketball we now have Best of Football. Today we see the releases of Leaf’s 2012 Best of Football, a $200/pack product that includes 2 cards per pack. Each pack includes one original Leaf Best of Football signed card and one slabbed or graded buyback card.

 

The original Leaf Best of Football signed cards are very similar to the baseball and basketball versions and include the player along with a sticker autograph. I have not been able to find a checklist but some of the players I have seen so far include Barry Sanders, Deion Sanders, Jerry Rice, Steve Young, Jerome Bettis and Deacon Jones.

 

As a bit of a bonus Leaf is randomly replacing the Leaf Best of Football signed card with a 1/1 signed sketch card or a 1/1 printing plate. There are also short print and super-short print cards, if I am not mistaken it appears that the green background cards are the base autograph cards with the blue background cards being limited to #/10 or less and the red background cards limited to #/5 or less.

 

 

 

 

The slabbed and graded buybacks are quite varied and include cards from Topps, Panini and Upper Deck as well as a handful from companies that are long gone like Score. I have watched a couple of box breaks and have seen a few Payton Manning rookies, a Tom Brady rookie and a Joe Montana rookie.

 

This product is a high risk/high reward product, at $200-250 a pack this is well outside of my price range but even if I were to have the spare cash in hand I do not think I would buy in, not at this point anyway.  Around 20 of the Best of Football signed cards have shown up for auction since this morning, the current highest bid is $20 for two different cards. Some of the names include Earl Campbell, Jerry Rice, Jim Kelly and Steve Young.

 

On Leaf's Facebook page they have been posting up a handful of the signed sketch cards, so far Mike Ditka and Rod Woodson. Some of these cards are pretty cool, it is interesting to see how the different artists decided to depict the player. My favorites are the cards from Jason Adams, he is a painter and actually creates stencils and uses different types of paints to achieve his creations though he does traditional sketch cards too. He has worked with Topps (Star Wars Galactic Files, Mars Attacks Heritage), Upper Deck (Marvel Premier, Marvel Beginnings) and now Leaf.

 

Here are the two cards by Jason Adams, you can see these are paint/sketch cards where he used a stencil and paint:

Here are a selection of the other cards that Leaf has posted on their Facebook page.