Review: 2025 Panini Prizm (Hobby Box)

Last week, I ripped a hobby box of 2025 Panini Prizm as part of my monthly Patreon group break club.  Today, I thought it'd be a good idea to "double-dip" and use that box for review purposes here on my blog!

Each hobby box of 2025 Panini Prizm comes with 12 packs (12 cards per pack).  In addition, each box promises three autographs (on average).  With all of that in mind, let's see how we fared with our particular box!

Base cards:

The base card design looks like any other year of Panini Prizm.  There's virtually no way I could ever differentiate which year of Prizm is which without flipping the cards over.  Luckily, Panini does do a nice job of labeling their card sets on the backside (something I wish Topps would do)!  This year's Prizm base set contains 300 cards with more parallels than you can possible shake a stick at!  

I must admit that Panini has gotten a lot better at making decent-looking base cards without being able to showcase team logos.  In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the Cal Ripken and David Ortiz cards are near works of art!

Inserts:

The 2025 Prizm set has several insert sets; we found four different sets represented in our particular box.  

The most common set was the Talisman set, of which we had four cards, including a nice Paul Skenes.  The concept of the set is fine (rookies), but the design is rather lackluster if you ask me.  

Moving on to more colorful inserts, we pulled three Fireworks cards.

The best thing I can say about these is that they are, in fact, colorful!  I think Panini dropped the ball here though; they should have made this set with the Prizm finish (aka Refractors).  The extra sheen would have made this design pop beautifully.  As it is, the cards still look good in hand (much better than the scans), but what could have been!

Next, we pulled two regular Prizmatic inserts plus a Prizm parallel #/99.

The Christian Moore is the Prizm parallel, and yes, the extra shine makes the card much, much prettier!  You can even tell from the scan how much more vibrant the Moore card is as compared to the two regular Prizmatic cards.

Finally, to finish off the inserts, we pulled a pair of very yellow Dingers!

I kind of enjoy the goofy designs that Panini puts out for its insert sets, and the Dingers! set certainly qualifies as goofy looking!  That all said, I do kind of like these, though your mileage may vary!

With the inserts out of the way, now we turn to the many, many parallels!

Parallels:

We'll begin with the Prizm (i.e,. Refractors), which are the most common type of parallel you'll find in a box.  

Our box produced six such Prizm parallels.  It should be noted that while most Prizm parallels are serially numbered, the Prizm parallels are not.

Next, we found five different Pulsar Prizms, each numbered out of 499.

We ended up with three of the five Pulsar Prizms being retired stars...and I have to admit that Hank Greenberg and Tris Speaker cards, in particular, look awfully weird with the shiny Pulsar treatment.  I think it's the monochrome image that makes for such a startling juxtaposition.

Next, we found three different Red Ice Prizms (at least, I think that's what these are).

The Red Ice Prizms are not serially numbered, but at least we got three good names!

Sticking with red parallels a little longer, we also found three Red Prizms (each numbered out of 299).

The Red Prizms are much more muted in overall design as compared to the Red Ice Prizms.  That said, I'll probably always prefer serially-numbered parallels over those without numbering.

Finally, we pulled five other serially numbered parallels of varying rarities.

Kellon Lindsay:  Blue Prizm #/199

Shinnosuke Ogasawara:  Purple Prizm #/149

Billy Amick:  Red Power Prizm #/99

Don Drysdale:  Green Scope Prizm #/75

Miguel Cabrera:  Orange Wave Prizm #/49

I love, love, love the variety and color of the various rarer parallels.  The Lindsay Dodger with the Blue border looks particularly good, as does the Orange bordered Miggy (and it's out of 49 copies)!  Good stuff.

That does it for the parallels, so without further ado, we can take a quick look at our three promised autographs:

None of our autographs were serially numbered (or parallels).  That said, I was happy to get a signature of a guy I had heard of prior to the break (Heston Kjerstad).  

Overall, I give the 2025 Panini Prizm hobby box the following rating:

Set Design:  C-

Collation:  A-

Opening Thrill:  B

Overall:  B-

I think the 2025 Panini Prizm set is a solid set, though it seems to be more geared towards team or player collectors as opposed to set collectors (parallel overload)!  I did enjoy the wide variety of cards, and most teams were represented within the box, which is nice from a group break host perspective (only the Blue Jays and Guardians were shut out)!  The autographs are going to be mostly young guys, so we'll have to check back in about five years to see if our selection was actually any good.