Ok, so I’ve tried to interpret the rules to the best of my abilities. If this belongs in the General subforum, so be it, move the topic, but seeing as the concept of price is going to feature heavily in this topic, I felt this was the proper place to put it.
Given the brooding these last few days with resealed WOTC boxes, certain “gurus”, the many possible attempts at manipulation and the general spike of anything sealed, what is going to happen? No company verifies (or are able) to verify sealed product. No-one is using Carbon-14 or Terahertz Spectroscopy on booster boxes any time soon. As of now, you don’t know what you buy. To the people of longstanding respect within the community and a strong pedigree to their boxes, this is going to be less of an issue.
But what about everyone else?
Take an example from my own collection (not trying to sell, just using an illustration):
I have a Fossil 1st edition box I bought around 2010/11. I bought several of them from the same very legitimate seller, I opened all of them save one and they all contained real packs with real cards. Case closed right? No, not by any stretch. Any potential buyers know full well I could be lying about all of it. Providing pictures of the other opened boxes is not enough, providing transaction data is not enough, nothing is enough. From the buyers point of view, the box could be a scam. The pedigree, on its own, is close to useless because I can’t prove that the box I’d be trying to sell is the same box I bought. Although I’ve been involved in this a long time, I’m a pretty private collector and I don’t have a huge phonebook I can display for people to ascertain my credibility. So naturally, in the future, the option of just opening the box and either selling the packs or ripping them and add to the grade-pile is becoming more tempting. I’ve already seen movement on this subject the last few days with more and more people thinking the same across multiple platforms.
Regardless of the possibility of manipulation and “that’s what they want you to do!”, the trajectory doesn’t really change much. Selling sealed boxes is going to become more lucrative to the few, and less so to the many. Boxes from high-profile sources with a strong pedigree is going to command a massive premium, and the amount of gradable cards is going to go up as more people break their boxes.
I feel that a lot of people don’t take this seriously yet, because we’re so attuned to the way things used to work just a few years back. A few hundred dollars per box in a market dominated by credible sellers, former distributors and harmless teenagers short on cash. Now, we’re in a shark tank of scammers, fleecers and flippers where buying boxes is more akin to investing in pink diamonds, just without the means of verification.
What are your thoughts? What could we/should we be doing? What do you think is going to happen? How can we protect our investments?