Select Australia have announced their first release of the year, with Footy Stars making another return for 2023! Footy Stars is traditionally the first series of the season, which aims to target all kinds of collectors. However, Select have shaken up their traditional release schedule by communicating to collectors about the discontinuation of 'Prestige', which will be replaced by the brand new Footy Stars Hobby!
Starting off with the retail release, Select have brought back familiar inserts such as Milestones, Gold Brownlow, Coleman, and Premiership Predictors, which are all updated with premium looking designs. 'AFL Classified' and 'Numbers' have also made a return, with the Classified's now printed on acetate and the Numbers cards presented with a metallic-gold finish! The Mascots' and Essentials' inserts have been introduced as unnumbered hits across both releases, being tipped to be popular with budding young collectors. Also a new insert labelled the 'Iconic', has now replaced last years widely hyped 'Virtuoso' set, with the new set also being numbered to 70.
An innovation that Select are testing this Footy Stars season is the introduction of the 'Rising Star Predictor', with ALL 18 teams represented! Collectors now have that added layer of speculation, allowing them to buy and sell the predictors of tomorrow's biggest stars, The beauty of these redemption cards is that some teams have multiple winning stakes under the one predictor, so do your research to see which teams have the best chance! Select haven't revealed what exactly the 'winning ticket' entitles card holders to, but given the success of the Coleman and Brownlow Booklets, you'd imagine it to be something similar!
As briefly mentioned above, the usual staples being the Brownlow, Coleman, and Premiership Predictors are all returning to Footy Stars with the Gold variants all being numbered to 260! 300 Game Case Cards are also retuning for 2023 with 8 new case cards available to collect, all being numbered to 300. These cards will only appear in each case sold direct from the Select website, or sold to Hobby Stores. Each case contains 2 case cards, with 1 in every 7 cases containing a 300 Game Case Card Signature! The signature card checklist features Marc Murphy, Tom Hawkins, Shane Edwards, and Shannon Hurn, with all cards individually numbered to 50.
To round out the retail release, Select has also introduced Instant Win cards, where the holder of the cards win one of 1500 prizes available!
Early into the Footy Stars release video, Select announced the discontinuation of 'Prestige' with its replacement named as 'Footy Stars Hobby'! The Hobby release contains all the core hits from retail Footy Stars, but also includes the Spectrum cards that were found across both Footy Stars releases in 2022. The hobby release also introduces an exclusive insert called the 'Carbon'! The Spectrum redemptions are currently listed as 2 cards per team, with Spectrum 1 featuring the captains of both AFL & AFLW teams, and Spectrum 2 depicting the Best and Fairest winners from both clubs for season 2022. Big news for those wanting to collect AFLW cards with now 2 numbered inserts guaranteed in the release!
Another big result from the news that the beloved 'Prestige' series is no longer running is that Platinum Predictors will now be included in the Hobby release! Brownlow, Coleman, Premiership and now Rising Star Platinum Predictors being all numbered to 60, can now be found in Footy Stars Hobby. It has been previously argued as to whether the Platinum variant's of predictors are released early enough within the footy card cycle. Meaning collectors now have the chance to speculate with the top-tier predictors BEFORE the AFL season even starts!
In terms of release dates for both releases, SCC members NOW have
the option to purchase a maximum of 2 hobby boxes from the Select website, whilst also getting first crack at buying the sealed cases of retail Footy Stars before they are made available to the general public! SCC preorder finished at 7pm on Tuesday the 28th of February, with the general release scheduled to go on sale at 12pm Sunday the 5th of March. Order limits are stated on Selects website as customers can purchase a maximum of 6 boxes of the general Footy Stars release, and a maximum of 2 boxes of Footy Stars Hobby. SCC members can participate in both release drops without fears of their orders being cancelled!
If you haven't had the chance to inspect the checklist for both releases,, follow the link to see ALL the cards scheduled to be released!
On the last episode of Card Authority, AJ and Butters were able to provide an in-depth breakdown of the release including all the major changes that collectors should get excited about! If you weren't able to catch the live stream for Episode 43, find the replay below and be sure to catch up on any previous episodes you might have missed!