The first thing you need to understand is why Prizm is King. Before there was Prizm, Topps Chrome was the Rookie Card everyone wanted. Yes, it was Panini's first take on a card with chromium technology, but is it really comparable to Topps Chrome? In my opinion, no it's not. But then again, in no way do I dictate the market.
The year was 2016, one of the hottest basketball prospects in a long time came out, in Ben Simmons. Panini released a bunch of new sets to cash in on the Ben Simmons hype as much as possible. One of those sets actually had a lot of success, 2016-17 Donruss Optic. So much so, Panini decided to release it in Football.
2016 Optic Football had immediate success in Football. It didn't hurt that at the time it looked like it was a loaded draft class. Carson Wentz, Jared Goff, Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott, and Michael Thomas were all products of that 2016 Draft class. And in 2016, besides Ben Simmons, no players in the hobby were hotter than Dak and Zeke.
What was Topps Chrome? In a nutshell, it was a chromium version of Topps. What is Donruss Optic? A Chromium version of Donruss. If Topps Chrome was King, why isn't Donruss Optic King now? It's essentially Donruss Chrome. Topps Chrome ended in 2015, Donruss Optic started in 2016, it lines up perfectly.
Perhaps it's the fact that by the time Donruss Optic was released, Prizm already had 4 years of sets to establish itself. Or it could be the fact that Basketball collectors gravitate towards Prizm, and when they switched to collecting Football they made Prizm their go to over anything else.
There's no denying Prizm outsells any of the other Panini Chromium cards like Optic, Select, and now Mosaic. In some cases the gap between a Prizm RC of a player and an Optic of a player can be 5x+. Does that mean Prizm will always be the go to set and sell for that much a premium? Time will tell.
In my opinion, Optic look the best. I'm personally a sucker for that Rated Rookie logo. First debuting in 1985 Donruss Baseball set, the Rated Rookie has now been part of the hobby, in one way or another, for over 35 years. And there hasn't been a set, in any product, that's been around that long. There's the Topps Rookie Cup in baseball, debuting in 1969 Topps, but it hasn't been in the product every year since then. It's come and gone over the years.
I'm not saying to stop buying Prizm Rookie Cards and only focus on Donruss Optic cards. But I do think the two products changing places and Donruss Optic becoming the "new King" are in the realm of possibilities. This market is constantly changing; sometimes the changes make sense, sometimes they make absolutely no sense. But considering Donruss Optic is more comparable to Topps Chrome (Former King) and being more aesthetically appealing than Prizm (in my opinion), Optic becoming the new King--at least to me--makes sense.
Even if it doesn't take over, the gap between Prizm and Donruss Optic is currently way too big. And it's only a matter of time before the gap closes. We've got people coming back to the hobby regularly; individuals who collected in the 1980s and 1990s. Do you think they'll gravitate to a product that they never heard of, because it wasn't around back then? Or the familiarity of that Rated Rookie logo, one that they remember from when they used to collect?
