2016-17 Panini Aficionado Craftwork #C-49 Christian Pulisic

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The 2016-17 Panini Aficionado Soccer product was released toward the later stages of Christian Pulisic’s rookie season on April 26, 2017.  The Aficionado brand was re-introduced by Panini in 2016-17 for soccer and basketball 20 years after it was used by Pinnacle to produce a premium 1996 baseball set.  Like its baseball predecessor in 1996, the soccer and basketball products each only had one-year set runs in 2016-17.  The 2016-17 Panini Aficionado Soccer product includes four total Christian Pulisic rookie-year cards: a base rookie card #41 (which has six parallels, including the base version), a Global Reach subset card #184 (which has five parallels, including the base version), a Craftworks insert card (which has no parallel versions), and a First Impressions autographed insert card (which has four parallels, including the base version). 

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The 2016-17 Panini Aficionado Soccer product was only issued in hobby boxes that each included one serial numbered autograph card per box. Thus, we can sum all these serial numbers and conclude there are 16,660 total autograph cards and the same number of boxes produced, allowing us to use pull rates to calculate print runs of each card.

 

The 2016-17 Panini Aficionado Craftworks insert set has a pull rate of approximately two cards per box.  This will lead to a total of 33,320 cards or 513 copies for each of the 65 cards in the set.  There are no parallels for this card so you will need to open 32.5 boxes, or 2.71 cases, of this product to pull one of the 513 copies of the 2016-17 Panini Aficionado craftwork #C-49 Christian Pulisic rookie year insert card. 

 

One other item of note on this card.  We believe the major grading companies are not grading this card correctly.  We believe the framing of the card front is designed to be “off center” with what appears to be a smaller border at the bottom.   However, we believe the design was made to the top of each player’s head being the top border and not the framing.  We certainly cannot prove this, but the grading of this card has been unusual in our opinion and we believe this is why.  As evidence of our position, there have been 15 Pulisic cards and 32 overall cards from this insert set graded by PSA as of January 2026 and PSA has not graded any of them as a PSA 10.  As noted on GemRate.com, none of the other grading companies have graded a gem mint 10 card for a Pulisic copy as of January 2026 either.