Thoughts Opening Modern Pack to Sell Singles

Market
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To preface, I fully understand you can’t make any real money doing this.

What are your guys thoughts on opening packs and selling them as singles on eBay or card shows. Do any vendors do this and is able to make money off it consistently even if it’s probably very very little.

Or is it pretty much guaranteed way to lose money over time.

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As far as I understand it, the only vendors that do it are the ones who are getting sealed product direct from distributor, in-hand before release date, at a very low price point, and ripping and sorting through the cards to list at a lightning-fast pace. The TL;DR: people who are in a position to take advantage of the first-to-market premium for ultra modern singles, and whose purchase price per card is lower than 90% of other people’s. And even then it’s mainly Japanese sellers.

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You’re better off creating a service on top of ripping packs I.e. whatnot or YouTube unboxings. Most rips are negative EV

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I don’t know what your intention is, but on a small scale (and still wholly dependent on luck), you could enjoy yourself at some prerelease events and hope to hit desirable cards there to trade/sell before the market is flooded. If you’re lucky, you can maybe subsidize your prerelease entry fee or earn a bit on top of that. But I’d expect that pretty much all modern sets have overall negative expected value.

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These are my thoughts.

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I think the only time this could work is opening them on release day (or prior) then selling immediately. Also would need to get better than MSRP prices.

I believe the only time I tried this was crown zenith release and I made basically nothing. Plus that set has better than avg pull rates and I even hit giratina vstar right away

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maybe start whatnot streaming. I hear they can make good money

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Assuming you bought the packs at retail price, the expected value of the cards inside will almost always be less than the purchase price for the pack.

As others have said, to profit doing this you need to either:

  • Obtain the packs at wholesale price through a distributor then sell the cards immediately after the set releases. Distributor relationships are fairly difficult to establish these days and require substantial capital commitment.
  • Offer a value-added service like pack ripping on whatnot or ebay live, and even then most streamers are selling the pack at a premium and opening the pack(s) on behalf of the buyer. Some will rip and attempt to sell the hits at a premium but this is much riskier because pack EV is often significantly lower than the pack purchase price.
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I believe some sellers do this to have inventory so the negative gain it means is just a form of marketing

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