Awesomeness From 2016 Donruss!

First off, Happy Opening Day to everyone! Today is the day where baseball games start to matter and the game we all love is with us every single until the World Series concludes in late October.

Now then, on my last visit to the card shop (detailed here), I picked up a few packs of some of the early 2016 releases. I've shown what I got from the four Topps Series 1 packs and it wasn't anything all that great. Donruss though, they brought it this year. Sure the design looks very similar to the last few years but each pack I opened contained at least one cool thing. 

First off the base cards. The absence of team names and logos doesn't really bother me as most of the pictures hide that fact. The design is very basic but at least the backgrounds aren't blurred and smoky like Series 1. I also like the fact there are legends mixed in with the current players, the Cal Ripken card above is a good example.

One thing Panini started doing last year with Donruss was having cards harkening back to past releases. Last year it was 1981, this year it's 1982. The Escobar card is really cool and I'm guessing that picture was taken right after the Royals won the Series.

Something else Panini threw in with Donruss this year is Team USA inserts. I'm not too familiar with either of these guys but it is pretty cool to cards like this in a release.

Now it's time to get to the good stuff. First, there's the 1982 pink parallel of Zack Greinke, which is pretty cool. Next, this Ichiro is just sweet. It's serial numbered and has a nice refractor-ish shine to it. I would have been happy with just these if they were the only two neat cards I pulled out of the packs but that was not to be.

Boom, Maikel Franco jersey card. It think this is some sort of parallel version as well as it's numbered to 150. Ok, cool, a jersey card. I'll take that.

Wait, another jersey card? This time it's Nomar Mazara from the Promising Pros line. I'm a fan of this concept as it's featuring nice big swatches from up and coming players. Two jersey cards is completely unexpected as I never have that kind of luck from packs.

What's this? A Rated Rookie manu-relic of Rob Refsnyder? Ok, that's pretty cool. This one is numbered to 999 and has a really cool die-cut design to it.

After opening these four packs, Donruss is so far my favorite product of 2016 as you at least get something neat in every pack. I'll definitely by buying more of this.

Now, time to sit back and watch some baseball!