Breaker's Club Recap: 2021 Panini Diamond Kings

It's been a couple of weeks since I busted the box of 2021 Panini Diamond Kings but for whatever reason it took me quite some time to get around to writing a recap post!  The good news is that I'm now ready and willing to write such a post, so let's get right to it!

The 2021 DK set follows the same general idea (and look) of previous Panini Diamond King offerings.   If you've liked the set in previous years, you'll probably like this year's offering.  And if you didn't like the set in years past, well, I'd skip this year's version as well if I were you!

The base set is your usual mix of current players, retired stars, and rookie cards.  Cards #101 - 170 are short prints...and for a set with only 170 cards, having about 41% of the set be short prints is a terrible insult to set collectors.  The Tanner Houck shown above is one of the aforementioned short prints.

*Editor's Note*  When I went through and sorted the full box of cards, I found we pulled a total of 17 short prints.  That's actually not so bad considering there were only 12 packs in a box.  I guess the short prints aren't as rare as the initial distribution may have appeared.  One nice thing about the short prints is that the card numbers are placed to the left (regular base cards have the card numbers centered on the card back).  It makes for a quick and easy sort that way!

Moving on to the inserts...as expected, Panini packed the set full of a variety of inserts.  We'll begin with the one that's closest in spirit to the name of the set:  Debut Diamond Kings.

This set appears to be Panini's way of cramming as many rookies as possible into the inserts.  We ended up with seven different cards from this set.  I do like the variety of background colors, I bet this set would look quite striking in binder pages!

We found three Legacy Lithographs along with three Aficionado cards.  

The Aficionado cards are probably my favorite out of the two insert sets - I guess I like the brighter color palette used for that set.  What I don't particularly like though is the fact that it appears that DJ LeMahieu has no eyes in the painting of him on the one Aficionado card!  Yikes!

The only other insert set for which we pulled more than one card from was a set simply called "The Club."  

Kind of strange to have a black and white painting of Killebrew with all that color on the borders but overall I must say that I do like this set.  Plus, who doesn't like pulling Nolan Ryan cards?!

The last four inserts all belong to different sets, about the only thing that they all seem to have in common is a lot of blue elements in each set's design!

For what it's worth, Diamond Kings sure seems to be closer to what Topps Gallery should be..such a strong "artistic" vibe going throughout the set, both in terms of design but also in terms of insert set names and execution!

That brings us to the framed paper parallels, always a popular pull out of Diamond Kings:

We found two Gray parallels plus one Plum parallel.  None of the three are serially numbered but I do think the Plum parallel (in particular) is striking.  I wonder if anyone out there is going to build a full Plum parallel set?  If they do, that'd be pretty sweet to see complete in a binder.

And last but not least, our two hits beginning with our autograph:

I don't know much of anything about Kohei Arihara but I do like the look of the autograph at least!  

And finally, our second hit was a dual relic of Joey Bart.

This one certainly has the potential to be the pull of the box, especially if Bart lives up to his hype.  

All told, I almost always enjoy ripping boxes of Panini Diamond Kings and this one was certainly a fun one!  Plenty of goodies that go spread around a number of different teams in the break, can't ask for much more than that on my end of things!  

More Breaker's Club box recaps to come - but for now I need to give my poor scanner a break!