Was it worth it?

[richiel1991]

@omahanime

@smpratte

I love when people who weigh packs say they don’t sell weighed packs. It perfectly illustrates the inherent ethical hypocrisy. You understand that selling a weighed pack is wrong, but don’t understand the wrong in selling the individual card you pulled by weighing the pack.

Is there any difference in weighing and position pulling? I do not remember the product, but about 12-13 years ago. I was at a store. The clerk was talking to his friend? He grabs a box, opens it. Grabs a top pack inspects the contents. Counts down, pulls a pack, opens, and gets a chase card. I heard this was possible with Pokémon. I have never order enough boxes of a set to learn if it exists, but in theory it would have better results than weighing.

I have heard of this in the sports card hobby, specifically in the late 80’s early 90’s with baseball. I believe they call it “patterning.” 1989 Upper Deck baseball boxes were infamous for this (allegedly), and it was a big deal because its the set that had both the Ken Griffey rookie card, Randy Johnson rookie card, as well as some funny error cards too actually. Basically the goal was to get the Griffey rookie, it was like the charizard of baseball cards, especially since this was before the big “crash.” I think that griffey card was actually card #1 of the set.

The way patterning worked was opening the first pack and seeing what numbers were on each card, there were 15 cards per pack, and 9 packs per row. Let say you opened pack #1 and got these 15 cards with the set numbers:

100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 so on…

well pack #2 cards would almost always go in a pattern like this:

99, 201, 301, 399, 499, 601, 701, 799

The first card of pack two would be exactly 1 card number in the set behind the first card of the first pack. The second card of pack two would be exactly 1 card number in the set in front of the second card of the first pack. And so on and so forth.

Basically lets put it this way, if you opened the first pack out of the box and the first card was #10 then all you had to do was go down 9 packs and you would get that #1 Griffey card.

Hopefully this makes sense, it’s interesting thats for sure. Now I have never bought a box of these myself, so i cant confirm this 100%, but I found out about this when chatting with a LCS owner in my area, then I checked messaged boards and saw others talk about it.

I heard @smpratte discuss sports cards before as well, so its possible he may have heard of this too.

*Edit just watched the video of guy patterning in the Triumphant box video that was linked above… wow what a jerk, that is EXACTLY how the hobby can be ruined It sucks that Pokemon made those boxes so easily patterned too

[smpratte]

That is true, certain sport cards sets are slot based. However, the sets are typically larger than pokemon sets, but the patterns can be recognized if you break enough boxes.

Sports cards are different as there are typically multiple cards that have value in a set, especially the further you go back in time. Weighing packs isn’t an option since they all weigh the same. The market is much more regulated.