I went to Mcdonald’s yesterday with some friends and cracked 6 packs, most of the cards are genuinely mint, but some came out in nm-/exc state, right away. We opened up the packs in the same way, so it couldn’t be us damaging them.
Also, i remember having the same problem with the “Aralia Premium Tournament Collection” (dunno if it’s been released internationally tbh). Cracked 7 boosters and got some of the cards damaged from the start.
Might be a quality check more poor?
Might be a logistic problem?
I don’t remember getting cards in a worse condition than near mint when i cracked packs as a kid tbh (vintage wotc and ex era), but… I was a kid, so maybe it’s a mandela effect?
Did you guys have similar experiences?
It bothers me to open a pack and don’t get the mint, you know… the product should be new, right?
I don’t expect them to all be psa 10 but I don’t like getting straight white lines on the borders, worse if some have them and some doesn’t…
I don’t think so, if anything modern production standard is much higher than vintage WOTC on average. Lots of WOTC cards came out with issues out of the pack and the Gem rate on a lot of cards is pretty low % wise. Something like McDonalds cards are going to be mass produced mainly for children at a low cost, so it’s possible they use a different assembly line when producing them, or you just got some unlucky packs.
Pretty much this I feel like. Old WOTC packs were almost expected to have some sort of issue (print lines, etc.). It was much rarer to find packs that were without any issues. But as a kid opening them I was just hyped beyond reason to find cards of Pokemon I saw in the TV show, so everything was mint in my heart.
I opened up a Charizard UPC a few days ago and honestly thought the same thing. I couldn’t believe some of the damage on these new cards. That being said, every V card hit looked absolutely perfect.
Here are some of the poor quality cards I pulled.
This whitening on this holo Butterfree was pretty crazy.
I’m sure I could find some more if I looked at the cards closer, but I feel the quality of common uncommon may be worse than even WOTC era. I don’t think people care much as long as the hits are decent quality.
It would be funny, someday in the future, if the commons would end up being the most rare (and expensive) cards of those sets to find in perfect conditions.
