It’s probably not true that light packs are below 33.x grams
I bought a batch of 1st base blisters awhile ago and the guy definite did not weigh them (parents gifted him when he moved out - more than 1m usd worth of sealed base 1st alone at today’s prices - he had no idea what were their values initially, think cardrushinc got a box off him for 20k+ usd)
The lightest were 32.1-32.5 grams and there was a distinct jump to ~32.8-33.3 grams for two of the blisters. The fact that 32.1 gram blisters exist must mean that 32.8 gram heavy blisters exist as well, given heavies are about half a gram + above a light
Coupled with the fact that blisters themselves have a significant premium over loose packs, most people would rather sell them vs taking the risk of opening them
When these different weighs merge into the general pool of blisters in the market, I imagine over time it would be quite difficult to confirm which are heavy or light, unless you had initial access to the original source or your blisters are just very heavy relative to regular blisters
Blisters are so difficult, depending on how they are stored they change their weight drastically. The paper absorbs a certain degree of moisture which makes the blister appear “heavy” even though it´s not. This is already a thing with boosters to a lesser extent - depending on the height you´re measuring and the climate you´re in, weights can vary - I bought some packs from an italian lady last summer and she showed me the weights of all of them (her scale was calibrated), when they arrived they were much heavier than what she showed me. I weighed them a few months later again and the weight came down, but not to the level she showed me before.
TLTR : New calculations suggest a light base set blister to be under 32.5g and heavy to be above 34.5g.
Quick Edit : Given@garyis2000's post below, the lower boundary would drop to 32.3g. However, an heavy pack under 20.9g appears to be extremely unlikely, so a blister under 32.5g would remain extremely unlikely to contain an holo.
@sgbased : Thanks for sharing this. I edited the TLTR portion of my previous message. The data points you are providing are way off those I used in my calculations and I myself weighed a 1st edition blister today that was 0.4g outside my theoretical limit. It seems like pack weight (base set) is well confined between 20.5g to 21.42g with gray zone at 20.9g to 21.0g. It seems like blister weight (base set) varies between 32.1g to 34.92g. My goal was to try to estimate the average weight of the packaging and its error limits and add this to the pack weight gray zone boundaries to establish the blister weight gray zone.
Let’s try something different. I think we can establish the weight of the lightest and heaviest packaging (always based on available data). If we substract the weight of the heaviest pack to the weight of the heaviest blister, we obtain the weight of the heaviest packaging. Likewise for light. This is 34.92g - 21.42g = 13.5g for heavy and 32.1g - 20.5g = 11.6g for light. We can then add the weight of the lightest packaging to the weight of the lightest pack known to have an holo and add the weight of the heaviest packaging to the weight of the heaviest pack known to have an holo. We find 20.9g + 11.6g = 32.5g for the low boundary and 21.0g + 13.5g = 34.5g for the high boundary.
As mentioned, the weight will likely vary widely from one box to another and from one storage condition to another, but we have no reason to assume that the same holds true within a box or same environment. Unlike what I mentioned earlier (my mistake), the variance of blisters from a given box or provenance may actually be quite low. I would anecdotally report DFW.Pokemon saying that all their blisters (all with apparently the same provenance and storage condition) “weigh around 34g”.
The goal here is to establish boundaries where we can be almost certain that any given blister contains a holo or not, regardless of the storage condition or provenance. Given the data available, if my logic holds true, I believe that any blister under 32.5g has virtually no chance at a holo and anything over 34.5g is pretty much guaranteed to contain an holo. Probability of an holo will increase as the blister weight increases. On the low end, you have to hope that the packaging is light to allow a 20.9g or heavier pack. I don’t think we have enough data or can hope to have enough data to quantify this probability. In other words, I don’t think we can tell that a 33g blister, for instance, is unlikely to contain an holo. We would need to better know the distribution of blister weight (i.e. are low 32g blisters very rare? are high 34g blisters very rare?).
Weight is function of gravitational force, but the change in gravitational force from going to a low altitude to a high altitude area is negligible for our use case. See :
While it might not make a huge difference (I never said that to begin with) it is still noticeable and might make you open or not open a pack, especially on the brink of “light” and “heavy” when you have no idea of comparables from the same source. However, moisture changes weights much more than a few .g, to get an accurate weight you need to put it in a dry chamber or demoisturize it. As said, scales were calibrated.
Barely, barely. See the post I referred to. A 0.06% difference on 21g is 0.0126g. Although they may display 3 digits after the decimal, the scale most people in this hobby use have a tolerance of +/- 0.01g. You probably should be more concerned about using a proper scale than the altitude you’re weighing at.
I spent the last couple hours refining one of my statistical models. This time I went through the painstaking process of valuing each individual card. The only assumption I made are that PSA 8 common cards that were never auctioned are worth $25. I used the last PWCC auction prices.
Assuming that pack fresh cards have a probability of 20% PSA 10, 60% PSA 9 and 20% PSA 8 :
LIGHT : $2,183
UNWEIGHED : $5,385
HEAVY : $11,986
The condition distribution is an optimistic representation of PSA population reports. It is probably the most realistic outcome.
Heavy is defined as guaranteed holo. Unweighed is defined as 1/3 probability of holo. Blister would fall in this category. The pack value is defined as what the contents of the pack is worth if you were to open an infinity of packs. Of course, there are other factors affecting the value than its contents (e.g. display, nostalgia, etc.).
Conclusion is that opening packs is a loosing lottery. Light packs have been long time overvalued, at best by about 100%, but now going 200, 300, 400+%. Heavy packs have been under to fairly valued, but are now trending up and going up to about 400% overvalued.
@bobleponge it can vary from .06% - 2.6% according to the link you provided, so depending on your location it might be up a difference in weight from 0,0126g to 0,546g which is definitely noticeable.
Opening vintage packs is most of the time a losing model, when ev>box value that will balance out rather quickly otherwise we would all sit here and open packs all day long
What do you think the pull rate of a PSA 10 card from a box fresh pack is, from a vintage box? I spent the last 2 days working on a model for most vintage sets. The results may surprise you (it entirely depends on that PSA 10 pull rate). The market looks very inefficient to me. I will share my results and the spreadsheets at the end of the month. It’s not rocket science, but it takes a bit of work to produce.
It really depends on the set, I didn’t do any math for it but I would guess for base 1st holos it’s something like 1/6 or even worse. You could get lucky by opening a box that has very good centering and cutting but if you average it out to a real sample size I would say chances are quite low.
So you say that 1 / (6 * 11 * 3) = 1 of 200 cards is a PSA 10? 0.5%? Or is there something special with holos that makes them less likely to be gem mint? They are cut from their own sheet, after all.
Based on the PSA population report of Base Set 1st Edition Charizards, eliminating PSA 7 and under (inclusively), we find that the PSA 10 population is 9.2%. Intuitively, this appears to me like an underestimation of the pack fresh pull rate.
Or you are saying that 1 of 6 card (picking holo as a particular example) is PSA 10? So 16%.
Based on my research, there are certain vintage sets that are profitable to open (when reaching statistical average) if the PSA 10 pull rate is around 20% or greater. If you remove grading cost and somehow still manage to get full value, then profitability can be achieved with a pull rate as low as 5%/75%/20% for PSA 10/9/8.
Right, I would guess that out of 6 packfresh holos 1 gets graded a 10 and the rest is 9 or lower. Holos are much more difficult to grade than non holos due to way more surface issues/silvering. We should move this discussion to another place, as it´s not specific to blister packs btw
After so many years I finally decided to buy proper digital scale so I could figure out what’s going on with the 1st ed. Base blisters. Venusaur pack was 32.65 grams and Blastoise pack 33.06 grams. These numbers seem to fit in range @sgbased provided on page 2.
However the most interesting discovery happened with Fossil Zapdos blister ( this is one of the first Secret Santa gifts I have received, based on the dark plastic colour and smell during opening it has been exposed to cigarette smoke for quite some time ) that actually shows 34.10 grams.
I have some question about this, does this weight difference between 1st ed. Base blister packs mean Blastoise pack might have something good inside and how do you explain the Fossil Zapdos blister? None of the three above have water damage.
Maybe. As established earlier, all your packs are within the lower and upper boundaries defined by the deviation from the mean of the weight of blister pack materials and cards. All we can infer is that your Blastoise blister pack is more likely to contain an holo than your Venusaur one and your Fossil one is even more likely so. We do not know how weights are distributed, so we cannot even tell that your Fossil pack is much more likely to contain an holo; it is just more likely. The TLTR of this thread is that, unless a blister pack is crazy light or heavy, you can’t know with a high degree of certainty that it contains an holo.
Now, we also have to consider that you have 2 Base Set blister packs. If you are going to make the assumption that both of your packs came from the same box (which is likely true if you are the original owner and that they were purchased at the same place and at the same time), then your Blastoise blister pack is even more likely to contain an holo. If we make the wild assumption that the packaging materials of the blister packs has no variability within a given box, then we can expect your Blastoise pack to weigh at least 20.5g (lightest pack) + 33.06g (Blastoise blister pack) - 32.65g (Venusaur blister pack) = 20.91g. That would qualify as being in gray zone. It’s a pessimistic estimation based on the fact that your Venusaur pack would be crazy light.
However, in reality, that last assumption cannot be true. Assuming that all data points reported in the eBay listing I referred to earlier (333849332436) are from the same box, then blister pack packaging materials would vary by at least 0.62g within a given box. That would again blur all the lines.
Update : I contacted the seller and he confirmed that these data points are not known for sure to be from the same box. That variability was also looking quite high. Assuming 2% variability within a given box, then we are looking at closer to 0.25g. That would still eliminate the certainty that the Blastoise pack is within the gray zone.
Now try this for ex era blisters lol… even more crazy to predict light/heavy. Interesting discussion - does anyone have insights into the other set blisters outside early wotc?
