I've been watching 2013 Press Pass FanFare for a little while, thinking about picking up a Hobby box at some point. To scratch the itch I've picked up a couple of Retail packs up off of eBay for fair prices, but buying a Hobby box would be $1-2 less per pack and also include a bonus Power Pack with a parallel card numbered #/5 or #/20, with the possibility of a memorabilia or autograph card.
Each pack offers 5 cards, with one guaranteed autograph or memorabilia card. In this pack I got base cards of Kevin Harvick and Greg Biffle, and a retail-exclusive red foil die-cut parallel of Matt Kenseth. The base set is large enough that I would never want to build it by buying packs, but since the hits are the main draw for this product I would imagine you could build a set on the secondary market at a 'reasonable' cost. I've seen some of the subsets selling in the $20 range, so you could put all 5 together for about the price of 1-1/2 boxes, although you wouldn't be getting the lottery chance of pulling that big hit.
The card design probably looks a bit better in person than in the scan, since copious amounts of foil tend to flatten out in the scanner. Still, I can't help feeling that a card with this much foil on it is trying too hard and winds up feeling a little cheap. I'd rather have thicker cardstock and a focus on high-quality photography than foil overload. But the base cards aren't the draw here.
This was a Kyle Busch hot pack, with the memorabilia card and the Fan Following insert both featuring the same driver. This is not the driver I would choose to pull a card from, but he is at least a fairly big-name guy and the sheet metal patch is nice and colorful. It is the lowest tier of hits, which makes sense because they are the most numerous cards in the print run.
Which brings me to my conflict with this set and really with all sets. I could theoretically pick up many of the memorabilia or autograph cards that I want on the secondary market for around the price of a pack of cards. But, I would be missing out on the slim chance that I have of pulling a big #/5 or 1/1 hit, or even a decent hit from my favorite driver/player, especially if that person is a superstar/fan favorite. In theory I could flip this card for an equivalent Tony Stewart relic or something similar, but that requires finding a trading partner who is willing to make the swap.
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