Blaster Review: 2021 Absolute Baseball

Happy Valentine's Day to those of you who enjoy that sort of thing!  One thing I love is baseball cards so let's celebrate this day of love by going through a blaster of cards.

As part of my current Breaker's Club, we recently ripped a blaster of 2021 Absolute Baseball.  This particular product completely passed me by back in '21 so I was kind of excited to see what the fuss was all about.  The blaster promised 5 packs with 8 cards per pack including a blaster exclusive autograph or memorabilia card!  In addition, each blaster promised 10 green parallels (5 base and 5 inserts).

Base cards:

We ended up with 19 different regular base cards.  The base set includes a mix of current players plus some retired legends.  By now, we all know the drill about their being no team logos on Panini stuff but if you can look past that the base design is solid enough (the card backs, however, leave something to be desired).  

Inserts:

We found 10 different regular inserts in the blaster.  With only 5 packs per blaster, that means we got 2 inserts per pack on average, definitely too high of a number to make the inserts feel special.  In that way, I think the 2021 Absolute Baseball set suffers from insert overload much in the way that recent Topps flagships have too many inserts.  All the inserts start to feel a bit "samey" and it completely ruins what should be a fun or special pull.  To be honest, none of the 2021 Absolute inserts that we found move the needle much for me, they are all kind of lazy designs and definitely all blend together too much for my taste.

Green parallels:

As promised, our blaster delivered 5 green base parallels:

And five green insert parallels (with the Griffey being my favorite card of the blaster):

To summarize, our blaster yielded 19 regular base cards plus 5 green base parallels to go with 10 regular inserts and 5 green inserts.  Those ratios seem way too high in terms of green parallels - I can't possibly imagine trying to build this set from scratch (certainly not from blasters, at least)!

Memorabilia:

We did get our promised blaster exclusive hit - in our case this super chunky relic of Keibert Ruiz (complete with a slightly dinged corner out of the box unfortunately).  

The Bottom Line:

Overall, this was a fun blaster for a group break since many teams got some neat cards (not the Reds though, my team was completely shut out in the blaster)!  That being said, this type of blaster configuration is not meant for people like me (i.e. set collectors) and that forces me to lower the score quite a bit.  

Pros:

Lots of variety
Relic or auto in each blaster
Retired players, current players, and rookies all in one

Cons:

Too many inserts 

Lazy insert design

Green parallels take up too large a percentage of total cards in blaster

In the end, I give this particular blaster of 2021 Absolute Baseball a 75/100.