Well, it’s here folks. Digital gambling with Pokemon cards. 
Vending Machine is a thrilling way to grow your CGC Pokémon collection digitally on Courtyard.io— and we just restocked it.
Rip digital packs with physical cards, chase heavy hitters, and grow your collection from the comfort of your home.
The final frontier.
Honestly, I think it’s going to be big among young people.
It’s crazy to me how there has been such a massive push to put gambling into everything over the last few years. It’s become so normalized at this point and I don’t think that’s healthy
Gacha, lootboxes and microtransactions in video games have also contributed to and normalized gambling tendencies with younger demographics in recent years. There are entire online communities dedicated to people flexing how much or how little they spent to pull a PNG of a character in a game. I wouldn’t exactly be surprised to see a push towards more avenues for digital gambling.
I’m curious how much of cgc’s business is mystery pack filler.
There are so few sellers on ig particularly who still sell traditionaly. The buyers demand gambling and the buyers are happy to overpay. It’s the wild west
Most of these companies wind up completely shifting their business model because cashflow is non existent, or the SEC figures out they are creating securities and brings the hammer down on them.
better luck next time 
It’s not even just video games, go into target or anything like that and half the toy aisle is mystery items. I guess it’s a good scheme for the manufacturers though, why sell a kid the exact doll or figure they want when you can sell them 5 they didn’t want.
It’s nice to see that the facade is finally dropping and we’re going in to full-frontal gambling. I hope unregulated gambling sites like these are taken down, but in the meantime, we can do some math to figure out how much money this “mystery pack” will make.
The stated odds are:
40% Common under $15 | 25% Uncommon $15-25 | 25% Rare $25-50 | 5% Epic $50-100 | 4% Legendary $100-200 | 1% Grail $200+
If we assume you get the low end of the value threshold (you always do) there’s about $20 of expected value in these packs. So it’s not even that they’re offloading unsellable CGC inventory, they’re actually seeking to profit about $5 per pack, or 20%. This also assumes their “values” are legit and not inflated, which is unlikely, but outside the scope of this post.
Keep in mind that actual casinos return about 90% of gambling bets to players. So not only is traditional gambling more straightforward, it’s also more “profitable” as a player.
I started seeing ads from Courtyard for the very first time in my IG feed yesterday - is this business just a variant of the gacha gambling that has become increasingly popular during the past few years, or is there more to this?
“choose to hodl”
Cringe and more cringe. I applaud cgc for continuously making collectors cringe with their business choices.
This will do pretty well with the crypto crowd I think. When you tokenize your card you get a royalty on it in perpetuity which is a cool idea in theory
It’s not surprising as this is where it was heading for a while.
If CGC 10 reverse holo commons are considered “heavy hitters” then I don’t even want to know what the lower tiers look like
To be fair, this entire hobby is built off of one of the original “mystery toys” with booster packs and holo cards.
The primary difference is that for booster packs, market value is based on pull rate. Whereas in predatory mystery boxes, the pull rate is based on market value.
It’s hard to deny that booster packs are a form of gambling. But there are different tiers of bad product.
I was replying to politoed’s comment about toy aisles being filled with mystery toys, not about these graded card mystery boxes.
looks worse than a courtyard marriott
