2012 Bowman Platinum Baseball Box Break Recap and Review

Bowman Platinum Baseball has been slightly reworked for 2012 and the minor tweets work quite well.  What carries over is the wide appeal to a variety of collectors, both hit seekers and set builders, all in a premium package. It remains a gold mine for “rainbow” PC collectors and the addition of die cuts, whole memorabilia redemptions from the Arizona Fall League and the continuation of Bowman Black autos makes 2012 Bowman Platinum Baseball one of the better boxes of cards this year.

Bowman Platinum falls under our premium cards category.  Each box contains 20 packs with 5 cards per pack.  Each box delivers 2 Refractor On-Card Autographs and 1 Refractor Autographed Relic.

Here are some of the cards we pulled.

Base Set

 Yu Darvish, front and back

 Bryce Harper, Chipper Jones, Clayton Kershaw

 Mike Trout, Yoenis Cespedes, Dylan Bundy

Base Parallels

Gold

 Eric Hosmer, Ian Kennedy

 Justin Verlander, Andrew McCutchen

 Emerald

 Adrian Gonzalez, Yoenis Cespedes

Ruby

Albert Pujols

Prospect Chrome Refractor

 Matt Davidson, Tyler Pastornicky

 Oscar Taveras, Chad James, Jabari Blash

Prospects X-Fractor

Anthony Gose

Prospects Green Refractor #/399

 Trevor Bauer, Miguel Sano

Prospects Blue Refractor #/199

Tyler Matzek

Inserts

Top Prospects

 Gerrit Cole, Manny Machado

 Manny Banuelos, Matt Adams

Cutting Edge Die Cuts

 Albert Pujols, Robinson Cano

The Hits

 Levi Michael and Oswaldo Arcia On-Card Autographed Prospects

Michael Choice Autographed Jumbo Relics Gold Refractor Patch #/50

Overall Look

These are sharp looking cards with great photography.  Cropping of player photos seems tighter than last year with the widest being about at the knees instead of full body.  Stadium backgrounds are still there but in greytone, making the players pop off the cards, one of the best combinations for shiny cards.  Bordering is cleaner on both the fronts and backs of the cards, allowing for batter placement of wording.  Configuration of auto cards and relics are optimal.  Die cut design is some of the nicest done this year.

Quality and Variety of Players

At 100 veteran base cards and 100 Prospect base cards, the checklist is a nice size of high quality players with enough variety to please most collectors.

Do the Hits satisfy? 

There are some really nice prospect autos to be found and as well as low numbered veteran autos.  Purely Platinum and Black autos are great finds.  Other hits like die cut autos, Bryce Harper Bat Plate and AZL Fall League memorabilia just add to an already solid lineup of hit cards.

Will you keep coming back for more?

Multiple box purchases are easy to see.  PC rainbow collectors should start with a least a box before hitting the aftermarket for singles are the way to go.  Those with deeper pockets should think about Bowman Platinum by the case.

Rating

5 out of 5

2012 Bowman Platinum Baseball delivers a superior premium experience for prospect, rainbow and set builder collectors.


Review box provided by Topps