What You Should Know About Panini Flux Parallels

Flux was released as a standalone product in 2020-21, debuting as a basketball product. While the cards have also appeared as football cards in 2022 Chronicles Draft Picks, the product is thought of as a basketball product… at least for now.

In this guide, we’re going to look at Flux Parallels and go over everything you need to know about the rainbow of the young brand. 

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What is Panini Flux Basketball?

Flux is a popular new basketball release that debuted in 2020-21 as both a hobby and blaster release. 

READ: 2022-23 Panini Flux Basketball is latest release of brand

Hobby boxes

Each hobby box, on average, contained the following:

• 1 Autograph
• 1 Uncirculated Topper Card
• 4 Inserts (1 Atmosphere and 3 additional)
• 1 Insert Prizm
• 3 Silver Parallels

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Blaster boxes

In the blaster box, you’d find:

• 3 packs
• 6 cards
• 3 Mojo parallels

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As you can tell from these numbers, parallels are hard to come by in Flux, but that also means they’re very valuable. But before diving in, let’s look at a couple of questions we often receive from our readers.

What are parallels in sports cards?

As we’ve written before, “parallels are versions of base cards that have some distinguishing feature (such as a color change) but in every other way have the same numbering and subjects as the regular cards in the set. These cards are produced in smaller quantities than base cards.”

Basically, they are colored base card variations. In opti-chrome, parallels look like the standard base version of the card, except they have colored borders. There are various colors of parallels, and some are rarer than others. Often they are numbered as well.

Opti-chrome card parallels can be traced back to the Topps Chrome Refractor. And here’s a bit of history: The Topps Company, Inc. registered a trademark for their brainchild to prevent other companies from copycatting it. 

Of course, other companies still mimicked the rainbow foil, but they couldn’t legally call them “refractors.” So, therefore, Panini started calling them “Prizm” cards. So, when we talk about Mosaic parallels, we’re talking about Mosaic “prizms,” technically.

How do you tell 2020-21 Panini Flux parallels from other cards?

Parallel cards are not hard to tell from base cards. While the image on the cards is the exact same, the border color will be different. 

Here’s a bit of trivia for you: while parallels change the border of the card and are easy to distinguish, variations change the image on the card and can be much more difficult to identify. You have to know what you’re looking for.  We looked at the differences between different types of cards in this article. 

What kind of parallels are in Flux?

For most brands, the parallel offerings diversify over time. Prizm, for example, started with silver, red, and green parallels. Now there are over 40 different colors in 2020-21 Panini Flux parallels. 

With that in mind, Flux is still a new product and so the parallel offerings will certainly expand, but it’s already off to a great start. 

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Here’s the current landscape of Flux parallels, with the expectation that they will add even more soon. 

Base parallels

• Light Blue
• Moonlight
• Pink
• Red
• Silver
• Sunrise
• Blue #/99
• Supernova #/75
• Solar Eclipse #/49
• Lunar Eclipse #/25
• Purple Scope FOTL #/18
• Gold #/10, Gold Scope FOTL #/8
• Green #/5, Black 1/1.

Cracked Ice parallels

• Blue
• Red
• Gold #/10
• Black 1/1

Laser parallels

• Base Laser
• Gold #/10

Mojo parallels

• Silver
• Blue #/99
• Red #/49
• Gold #/10
• Black 1/1

What are Flux atmosphere cards? Are those parallels?

One prominent set in Flux contains layers of the atmosphere as different sets: the cards are Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere, and Exosphere sets are used to provide a ranking, of sorts, for the NBA’s hierarchy.

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Collectors can easily mistake those as parallels, but that is not the case. With these Flux Atmosphere set, it’s a “ranking” of the NBA players so each player only has one card. Think of it as the NBA 100 broken down into tiers. 

For example, there are only five players with Exosphere cards: LeBron, Luka, Steph, Giannis and LeMelo Ball. Those five players only have exosphere cards. 

How do Panini Flux parallels compare in value to each other?

Panini Flux parallels compare with each other in price about the same way as all parallels – all the unnumbered ones selling for similar prices with a bit of a premium on silver, while the numbered versions get increasingly more valuable as the numbering descends. 

The unnumbered parallels still sell for quite a bit more than the base rookies, however, so it’s always worth investing in parallels instead of paper base rookies when it comes to Flux. Far too many base rookies are printed for them to ever hold long-term value, even if they’re PSA 10s. 

As an example, a Lamelo Base base rookie recently sold for $6, including shipping, while the silver version sold for $25 on the same day.

Since the silver is worth almost 5x as much in most cases, it should always be the focus of your investment opportunity (or, even-numbered parallels, which will be even rarer.)

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Bottomline on Panini Flux Parallels

While we don’t know what the future looks like for Flux, if the product maintains steam it could be a great investment alternative to the bigger-named brands.  If you can scoop up some raw rookies of your favorite players and get them graded mint, then the scarcity will bold well for their value over time.

What do you think of Flux parallels? We’d love to hear your grading experience, thoughts, and points. Just share with us on Twitter @card_lines. 

Full 2020-21 Panini Flux checklist