Review: 2011 Totally Certified Football

First and foremost, I have got to give Tracy Hackler and Panini a shout out for making this box available to us to review for them. Much thanks goes to them. Here is what I got. I was already impressed with the product to begin with and it did not disappoint me.

Box Design: Loved the box design. Probably one of the best I have seen this year. A lineup of All-Stars and top rookies on the cover. I would definitely grab this from a hobby shop!

$$$$ out of 5

Wrapper: Matches the box. I wished it did however have a player or two on the front. But overall, not bad looking.

$$$ out of 5

Base Card/Inserts:  I had to combine the two since I must have deleted a picture by mistake. Sorry for that. The Base card design is spectacular. The best design with the dufex technology used. This kind of look makes you want to collect the base set!! The base cards are normally a red back ground. This is a blue parallel we pulled of Brian Urlacher. The only one in the box. But, it is numbered to 50.

$$$$$ out of 5

Inserts Part Two: Panini did a great job of sneaking in these cards of Pepsi Rookie Of The Week winners of 2011. Loved doing the voting and now having the card in person.

$$$ out of 5

Memorabilia: What more can we say??? They glisten. Very good size of jersey piece in the Certified Future jersey cards and they are numbered to 499.  Heritage Collection jersey of Jim Thorpe!!! Wow! Heritage has a great variety of old time vets and we pulled a nice one numbered to 100. The Stitches in Time is an incredible looking 4 jersey piece beauty. We got 4 Super Bowl winning qb's on ours. This was numbered to 90. We have seen some pretty sick Prime versions of that as well.
  

$$$$$ out of 5

Autographs: You get one of these sick cards in every box.  Signed on card. And numbered to 499. We got Vincent Brown of the Chargers who could step in for Vincent Jackson who left. We also got a redemption, not pictured, for a Nathan Enderle Freshman Phenoms Sigs Blue.

$$$$ out of 5

Overall: You could tell this product would score high. The only negative was the redemption. Other than that. A solid looking product with tons of potential. The pictures here don't do this product justice. I find this product well worth the $150 per box price tag. And if you try it, you would too!

Also, look forward to a couple of contests with some cards from this break!!!

Panini Adrenalyn XL Trading Card Game:updated with more info!

Do any of you play this game for basketball, football or hockey? (Topps has a version for baseball that I haven't tried)

Its a great concept and something I rather enjoy. It combines 2 of my favorite things. Sport Cards and games. However, I still collect the cards like they are cards sometimes. If I get a good rookie card or a hard to find one those are the ones I collect. The Adrenalyn cards do include Sp's like the Silver Signature Brett Favre version which I own, these type of cards get put elsewhere. They are also hard to find. About 3 per a box if you were to buy a box of this product. Favre is one of the rarer finds.

As for the game, you play it like the real sport. It comes with a game board, rules, a binder to put them into and some packs of the cards. And each player, depending on how good they are, have a value number for their position (if the sport is football each player has a passing and running value for offense and defense) and you follow each sports rules. Its not very hard, but is a ton of fun and addictive if you have a sport fan in your family who you can start a rivalry with.

Here is a quick example of how to play the football version we have pictured:

 

As you see, If you throw to Calvin Johnson, you would take Tom Brady's pass number and add it to Calvin Johnsons. That gives you a total of....64. You then look at Brian Urlachers pass number and you subtract that from Calvin's number...64-49=15 yards is what you would gain. This is just a basic way to play. You could complicate things some and add on the boost numbers and so on. Its played like real football. You have 4 downs to get 10 yards. You have 4 quarters and each team gets a possession per quarter. Each Team gets 7 players per offense and defense. 2 on each side are reserves. You can also use them as the markers on the side to mark the quarter, down and the line of scrimmage and where the first down is. These are the breakdown of the 2010 game.

Just one more tip, I have found it more efficient if you are playing someone who doesn't know much about sports, if you shuffle the deck of cards before splitting it in half to make your player selection so that way you or they don't get all of the good players.