More than a decade later, Jim Stefano still remembers the exact moment ultra-modern cards changed forever.
Flanked by the rest of Panini America’s product development team, Stefano looked on as the first mockup for a new insert set was revealed. He and the team didn’t know what to expect, but they knew it wasn’t this.
In front of them was an image of Kobe Bryant, legs drawn back with his right hand cocked behind his head, preparing to deliver what would surely be an explosive dunk over a hapless defender. The spirit of the image had been seen many times before, but this was no photograph.
For this project, there was no crowd and there was no Staples Center. On this card, Bryant was a superhero, catapulting toward the edge of what should have been a comic-book frame, not a sports card.
“We thought it was really cool internally,” Stefano, now Panini’s VP of product development, told cllct. “We weren’t thinking this, but that’s why we gave the creative freedom. The very next thought was how collectors were going to see this. We found out real quick.”
The project was 2013-14 Innovation Basketball, and that sketch of the very first “Kaboom” would change the sports card market for the next decade.
A departure from traditional design
Superhero. Folk hero. Kaboom.
Those are all the instructions the Panini team gave freelance illustrator Gyula Nemeth when hiring him to create the first sketches for what would become the most important insert set of the era.
A Hungarian designer based in Budapest, Nemeth had worked with Panini on multiple sets before Kaboom, including Triple Play Baseball and the Nicknames insert set from Hometown Heroes Baseball, which featured illustrations of popular MLB players.
Kaboom would be a much bigger challenge, however. Then-creative director Brandon Lesley asked Nemeth to deliver a comic book-style insert with players featured in a variety of slam dunk poses — it was a style Nemeth had little experience with, and he had just weeks to deliver a 20-player set.
“The hyper-dynamic poses and the overemphasized muscle anatomy were definitely new to me,” Nemeth told cllct. “Coming up with so many different dunking poses was another challenge. It was even harder when a few years later, the insert set grew in size. It’s always pretty hard to not repeat yourself visually.”
In total, it took Nemeth four weeks to complete sketches for the entire set, which also included mockups of new sneakers for each player with Panini unable to use designs for popular brands such as Nike or Adidas.
For Panini and collectors alike, Kaboom was a drastic shift from the traditional design built around a striking photograph. Once the design team added an explosive silver background to compliment the red and yellow text, Panini was left with something it had never expected.
It was a calculated risk to offer only a few details to Nemeth before he started sketching. But more than a decade removed from its debut, there is little doubt it was the right decision.
“We didn’t want to steer the illustrator down a direction that their mind didn’t want to take them,” Stefano said. “That’s where the artistic liberty comes in.”
In those first moments, it was far less clear.
“Is it too different that the collector is going to say it’s gimmicky? I mean, you have this range of emotions to go through, because really every product we do is an individual IPO,” Stefano said. “As a product development team, we have a hard time letting go. But when you do let go, you have to trust that the homework you put into it is going to resonate with the collector, and people are going to open up packs and chase these things.”
In its second year, 2013-14 Innovation Basketball had the makings of a long-term winner for Panini with Kaboom as the key chase. In theory, Kaboom was the type of card that could carry a product in the marketplace for years.
Then Innovation Basketball died.
A product "before its time"
More than 10 years removed from Innovation’s debut in 2013, the basketball card market is nearly unrecognizable.
In 2025, collectors often battle over any allocation sold directly by Panini America, while secondary-market prices can regularly reach 200% or more of the original MSRP. Even high-print run retail configurations, such as the Costco-exclusive Donruss Football release, have sold with extreme velocity for a premium on the secondary market.
In today’s market, the hobby regularly sees record-breaking prices for basketball cards, including the $516,000 paid for the Victor Wembanyama 2023 Prizm Black Shimmer FOTL 1/1 PSA 9 and the $234,850 paid for the Caitlin Clark 2024 Select WNBA Signatures Gold Vinyl 1/1 PSA 10.
And among the key inserts in today’s hobby, none have thrived on the secondary market like Kaboom.
According to Card Ladder, the record price for any Kaboom is the $225,000 paid for a 2018 LeBron James Kaboom Gold /10 BGS 9.5 through a private sale in October 2024. To date, the highest price paid at public auction is the $188,400 that a 2021 Tom Brady Kaboom Green 1/1 PSA 8 fetched at Goldin in February 2022.
But in 2013, the basketball card market was anything but thriving, and Panini was desperately trying to save it.
An Italian company previously known to collectors for its popular World Cup sticker sets, Panini shocked the trading card market when it won the exclusive rights to make licensed NBA cards in 2009.
Following years with Topps and Upper Deck at the helm, the NBA market was suddenly handed over to an international company with little experience in the space. Panini remedied some of those concerns with its acquisition of the iconic Donruss/Playoff brand, which also came with rights to make NFL trading cards, but the sudden shift in landscape would be difficult to navigate.
Shortly after securing rights to the NBA and NFL, Panini delivered a number of releases that are now considered among the era’s most important and influential.
Panini stunned collectors with the launch of National Treasures in 2009 as an ultra high-end set featuring autographs, memorabilia and an MSRP of $400 per pack.
Today, National Treasures is home to the most sought-after Rookie Patch Autographs for the NBA and NFL.
After years without a flagship chromium release, Panini delivered the Prizm brand as a direct answer to Topps Chrome in 2012. Featuring a double rookie class due to the 2011 NBA lockout, Prizm arrived with mixed results, but has since grown to become one of the most important brands in collectibles.
Despite eventually becoming some of the hobby’s favorite products, many of Panini’s early NBA releases failed to resonate with fans and collectors the way the company had hoped. For Panini, among the biggest challenges was the growing pressure to revive a slumping NBA market while also building the hobby’s footprint at retail locations.
In the ultra-modern era of trading cards, a significant amount of space is allocated to the category at national retailers such as Target, Walmart and a growing number of specialty stores. That was far from the case in the years immediately following Panini’s entrance into the NBA market, but the company was fighting to make it happen.
Considered by many collectors to be a lower period for the hobby, the late 2000s and early 2010s were also years when big-box retailers were pushing to become local hobby shops at a national scale. At the time, retailers knew collectors were willing to travel to local card shops or shows, and it would be easy to grow revenue if manufacturers were willing to fill store shelves with retail-exclusive products.
Creating the right brands and product configurations necessary to support both hobby shops and retail stores was challenging, however, and, despite featuring both Kaboom and Panini’s first iterations of the now-popular Stained Glass insert, Innovation Basketball was one of the earliest casualties after just two years in the marketplace.
“I think [Innovation] was before its time. We were still building that basketball category up,” Panini senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations Jason Howarth told cllct. “If you were to launch a product like that today, there would automatically be more acceptance, just because there’s more people already in the community because of what Panini has done over the last 15 years. It’s almost like a whole world away — 2013 — when you think about basketball and where it was compared to where it is as a category today.”
Like many brands and designs before it, Kaboom didn’t have the power to carry an entire product on its own. Innovation Basketball simply wasn’t successful enough, but Kaboom didn’t have to die with it.
Panini just needed to find it a new home.
The market explodes
For the time being, Kaboom would find a soft landing in 2014-15 Excalibur Basketball.
The third and final release in a series of Target-exclusive NBA products for the 2014-15 season, Excalibur arrived with three unique retail configurations and a new case hit Panini believed collectors would covet.
The pursuit was on, though secondary-market prices at the time were startling compared to what key Kaboom inserts fetch in 2025.
Of the nearly 500 Kaboom sales tracked by Card Ladder across 2014 and 2015, the highest price paid was just $661 for a 2014-15 Excalibur Kobe Bryant.
Kaboom would anchor Excalibur Basketball for 2015-16 and 2016-17, too, but was once again orphaned from a canceled product for the 2017-18 season.
Panini delivered Kaboom to a new sport for the first time with 2017-18 Select Soccer and even created a standalone Kaboom set available through the Panini Rewards program at the end of 2018.
It wasn’t long after that Kaboom found its new basketball home with the resurgence of Crown Royale, which, following an extended hiatus from 2009 to 2017, made its return as a standalone set for the 2017-18 basketball season. Featuring its own lineup of ultra-rare inserts that included Pacific Marquee, Power in the Paint and Regents of Roundball, Kaboom would once again find a soft landing.
“One thing that our product team does really well and our design team has done really well, is when they look at the post-mortem of a product, they ask what performed in the product and what didn’t perform,” Howarth said. “How can we make it better? If the answer is we just can’t make it better, it wasn’t accepted. They ask if there are things within that product that were accepted and how do we continue to bring those forward into other products.”
Kaboom fit in alongside that group for the 2018-2019 season, and it was arriving just in time for the card market to be completely reimagined. While the sports and trading card market appeared to explode out of nowhere to many, a number of savvy hobbyists believe signs of an eruption had been building and the pandemic simply added fuel to a fire that was already spreading.
The Card Ladder “CL50” Index, which uses 50 hand-selected cards to represent the overall health of the sports card market, sat at a value of 2,399 in May 2015. It climbed to 3,748 in November 2017, hit nearly 4,000 in September 2018 and then boiled from 5,471 in December 2019 to as high as 31,177 in March 2021.
Powered by outstanding NBA rookie classes in 2017 and 2018 — those two classes have combined for 11 All-Stars and six All-NBA players — the market for basketball cards had a strong foundation when collectors began reentering the hobby en masse.
The market accelerated when the 2019 NBA Draft class arrived as collectors swarmed for cards of Zion Williamson, who many believed to be the best prospect since LeBron James, and Ja Morant, who has gone on to become an All-NBA superstar.
The market was collectively surging, and Kaboom was thriving along with it.
Following that high sale of $661 across 2014 and 2015, the record price at auction for a Kaboom jumped to $910 in 2016 and then erupted in 2019 when a 2018 Crown Royale Luka Doncic Kaboom PSA 10 fetched $4,050 at PWCC.
That success sparked another move for Kaboom. The set would remain safe under the Crown Royale Basketball brand — at least for now — but would expand to the gridiron with 2019 Absolute Football.
By the end of 2019, Kaboom had featured top stars from basketball, football and soccer in standalone sets and even baseball as part of the Panini Rewards program. The hobby was expanding rapidly, and Panini knew Kaboom should expand with it.
For Panini, it has been important to include the company’s most famous insert in sets across a spectrum of sports, but accomplishing that has never been easy.
Unlike other iconic Panini inserts such as Downtown, which is largely linked to the Donruss and Donruss Optic brands, Kaboom has persisted through a more fragmented existence.
Today, Kaboom has even appeared in sets for the WWE and UFC through the Revolution and Panini Instant brands.
Beyond deciding when to deploy Kaboom in a new sport, Panini has always had to navigate how it fits into each product. The design and spirit of Kaboom is distinctive — there are just two parallels, with Gold /10 and the Green 1/1 debuting in the 2018 Panini Kaboom set — and the insert never features autographs or relics from the manufacturer.
Based on secondary-market sales, Kaboom can be considered an ultra high-end card, but Panini has never felt an ultra high-end set should be where it lands.
According to Stefano, Kaboom has never been viewed as a good fit for sets such as Flawless, National Treasures or Eminence, and it should instead be placed a tier below.
For the first time since it landed in Crown Royale Basketball six years ago, Panini recently revisited Kaboom’s place among the company’s basketball offerings. Without a flagship Crown Royale release planned for the 2024-25 basketball cycle, Kaboom will shift to 2024-25 Revolution Basketball.
Expected to release in May, few details have emerged for Revolution in 2025, though collectors did immediately notice a significant change for Kaboom.
After years of designs gradually shifting away from the concept, Kaboom would be returning to its comic book origins, and Nemeth was the one leading the way.
A lasting legacy
In 2025, the impact Kaboom has had on how sports and trading card products are designed is undeniable.
Despite lacking autographs or relics, Kaboom is the key chase for whatever product it appears in. The hand-drawn illustrations have always been the biggest draw and the distinctive “Kaboom!” logo itself can be spotted from afar.
The background for Kaboom, which has largely remained unchanged throughout the years, is even so recognizable collectors can easily spot the case hits from just a sliver of the card’s edge.
“When we started doing this, we knew we wanted some type of shiny, sparkly background to be part of it,” Stefano said. “Because with Kaboom, it’s explosive and when you’re fanning through the cards and you sort of slide them on one edge to see if you have something, we wanted people to know that they got something special.”
Together, the visual elements add up to possibly the most important design of the ultra-modern era and the concept has spilled into a variety of products for Panini since. If the influence of Kaboom’s designs on the period were compared to a coaching tree, it might be the era’s Bill Walsh or Gregg Popovich.
Kaboom’s influence is most heavily seen on the super short-printed “Explosive” insert, which debuted in 2021 Absolute Football with a similar background.
Hand-drawn designs have also greatly resonated with collectors over the years as well, and Panini has deployed the style for inserts, including NBA Hoops’ Presentations, which Nemeth helped design, and features illustrations for the game’s top stars.
Prizm, arguably Panini’s most important and popular product in 2025, has featured the Manga set, which uses its own comic style, as well as Prizmania, which delivers hand-drawn players with cartoonishly-large heads.
Both the Luminance and Donruss brands have even featured the Animation insert, which places hand-drawn players onto a comic book-style background.
Then there’s Downtown, arguably Panini’s second-most important creation of the era. Featuring original artwork with backgrounds unique to the featured player’s team and city, the set first arrived in 2016 Studio Basketball as “From Downtown.”
Much like Kaboom, Downtown has evolved over the last decade and is now featured across a number of sports, but is mostly associated with Donruss, Donruss Optic and the high-end One and One Basketball set.
“I think Kaboom is the game-changer of the modern era of super short-print trading cards,” Stefano said. “It’s the Babe Ruth of super short-print cards, and we were fortunate enough to come up with the idea and execute it.
“I think it changed how collectors perceived high-value cards. The secondary-market value of these cards — it makes my head spin when we see the value and how these have evolved.”
The current era in the hobby features more types of cards than ever — there are more autographs and relic cards entering the marketplace than during any period before, but there are also more case-hit inserts and super short-printed sets, too.
Collectors have so much to choose from, but when they vote with their wallet, it’s often sets such as Kaboom that rise to the top.
A search for the term “Kaboom” in Card Ladder returns more than 5,000 public sales of $1,000 or more since 2024, nearly 200 sales of $10,000-plus and more than 50 of $20,000 or more.
In total, Card Ladder has logged seven sales for a Kaboom of more than $100,000.
A major driver of those secondary-market prices has been Kaboom’s status as a difficult grade — print lines can often appear across the card’s background, and the set’s thicker cardstock provides additional surface area that can be damaged.
According to third-party grading tracker GemRate, PSA has graded more than 45,000 Kaboom cards and just 36% have secured a 10 grade. At 53% and 55%, respectively, Panini’s other iconic inserts from the era, Downtown and Color Blast, have been much safer grading submissions.
Other Kaboom-inspired sets have also experienced incredible success on the secondary market. The record price for any Explosive variation, according to Card Ladder, is the $20,000 paid for a 2021 Absolute Football Tom Brady Green 1/1 PSA 10 earlier this year. A 2021 Prizm Tom Brady Manga fetched $15,400 in 2022.
The record for any Downtown variation is the $108,000 paid for a 2020 Donruss Optic Joe Burrow Gold Vinyl 1/1 BGS 7.5 at Goldin in 2022.
Panini’s super short-printed inserts, including Kaboom and others, have even thrived on the secondary market for key players during a period where autographs rights are split between Panini and other manufacturers, making how collectors choose to spend their money extremely complicated.
Wembanyama and C.J. Stroud, for example, can only sign autographs for Fanatics products — Panini currently holds the exclusive licenses to use logos and team names for the NFL and NBA, however, meaning collectors hunting the top of the market have had to choose between licensed SSPs such as Kaboom or autographs with a player wearing what looks like a set of plain pajamas void of logos.
To date, the highest sale for any Stroud card is the $72,000 that a 2023 Absolute Football Green 1/1 PSA 9 fetched in September 2024. Of Stroud’s highest public sales, three of the top six are Kaboom variations, while two of the top 10 are unlicensed autographs.
Wembanyama’s most expensive Kaboom, which sold for $40,260 in 2024, also presents favorably against his most coveted autographs and relics. Though that Kaboom is far from his highest public sale, it’s only topped by nine total autographs, seven of which are 1/1s.
“It’s never about what you don’t have, it’s about what you do have and making the best that you can out of that,” Stefano said.
What Panini does have has been more than enough.
The hobby has had design revolutions before — 1990s inserts and the earliest refractors are dearly beloved by so many modern collectors, for example — but for this era it’s hard to point to any other series of cards as more influential.
Panini thought it might have something special when Nemeth returned his first sketches years ago, but even the most optimistic would have never expected Kaboom could change an entire era of cards.
But that’s exactly what it did.
“When we started to work on the first insert, I surely didn’t expect that it would be a huge hit,” Nemeth said. “The set I was working on before Kaboom was like an entry-level set for kids. … So when I heard that Kaboom was a case hit, I felt much more pressure. I knew it would get more attention than anything I had done to that point.
“I usually say that some projects are more important than the rest. Those very few ones that, in a way, become part of your own identity as a creator. The Panini projects really gave me so much in the past decade, people reach out to me very often saying how iconic this insert is, and I see how collectors still cherish it. It’s a rare thing.”
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct.