Aw cool they let you deal your own blackjack hands and drop the ball on the spinny wheel yourself at the casino?
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Card games require a dealer, roulette requires a neutral party to drop the ball. Pokemon packs do not require a hype beast to rip your pack. Honestly shocked at how many people like paying others to have fun for them
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nvm I regret saying anything
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If there is a reason why a box breaker REQUIRES buyers to allow their packs to be opened live I am all ears. As is, all of the points have been “its how box breaks are, if you dont like it dont buy” which was not the point at all.
I am questioning the norm of why a majority of breaks don’t allow sealed ships or ask higher prices for it (and why people don’t seem to notice or care).
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Unpopular opinion: Arby’s is flippin’ dope.
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their meat sandwich looks like a wad of cash lol
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If all the packs are opened then it’s pretty transparent that you as a seller are legit and all participants can see that they haven’t been hoodwinked. Once the audience sees this, they know that if they buy a pack from you in future it’s virtually ironclad that they wont get ripped off. Earning that kind of trust from your customer base is invaluable.
If the packs all go out sealed then firstly it’s much more possible that the seller could have pulled some shenanigans such as sending out 36 light packs or even just siphoned a few heavy packs out for themselves and secondly as a seller you open yourself up to some random customer who throws a tantrum at getting a non-holo making disparaging claims about you that could really hinder your reputation.
Finally, there is actually a unique experience that comes from taking part in a ‘box break’ as opposed to just opening up a pack yourself. There could be hundreds or even thousands of people watching your pack get opened, as well as possibly a content creator you’re fond of, it’s actually quite exciting.
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If you’re going to card trade shows or collect a cons without being fully vaccinated and/or continuing to wear a mask and socially distance, you’re a part of the problem.
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My opinion on box breaks: they guarantee unweighed packs, but they can often be predatory, deceitful and wastes of money.
We all know the pro of unweighed packs. What I will say is the larger the streamer/credibility, the lesser the chance of fraud. Box breaks can build an individual’s reputation online and on social media. However, credibility brings me to the topic of deceit.
If your “friends” are charging you more than market price for you to sit down and watch them open packs YOU paid for on stream, sorry to say but that isn’t friendship, that’s a business transaction and you have some poor friends. If my friends wanted me to open some packs for them, I’d charge them market price and not a penny more. I am not one to profit off of my friends. Chances are if I’m streaming, then I’m making money off donations, subs, views and ads. That’s a lot of revenue from places OTHER THAN friends. I wouldn’t need their money. Would you pay that premium if you were with your friends IRL? Would you meet up with your buddies to split a box, watch one of your buddies who owns it break the sealed box in front of you, then pay more than what the box cost to later sit down at home with them, crack a few cold ones and see who gets lucky? No, you wouldn’t. If the value is in the experience, then the experience is the value. Buying into a box break costs money. Watching a box break is free. If the only difference between buying into and watching a box break is that by buying in, you get the contents of a pack, then there should be no premium on that pack. Otherwise, the breaker should be charging people to watch the break as well.
What if you’re not friends with the breaker and you pay a premium? Okay, well that is just a business transaction. The “experience demands a premium”, sure lets roll with that. And what exactly is that experience? I’ll tell you exactly what it is. It’s an often over-expensive gambling session broadcasted to more people than could possibly fit in a casino, It preys on the gambling addiction of consumers who can’t find modern product or want guaranteed unweighed vintage packs, but aren’t able to or don’t feel safe buying product. Thanks to social media, more people than ever can watch someone hit big or fail miserably. The arguments I’ve seen in support of the “experience” sum up to “packs are unweighed so I can comfortably gamble on them, and if I win a lot of people get to see it” - i.e. “brain requires more dopamine to satisfy gambling addiction.” Not many people disclose the reality that buying into a box break is gambling or its implications. This is the predatory side of box breaks.
Additionally, hardly anyone breaks boxes from DP through XY. Why? Because those boxes have such negative EVs that no one wants to gamble money on something without a chance of making their money back. Almost as if the money involved DOES matter and the people buying into breaks think about the money in some way before buying packs. If people participated in a break just to get a good hit, then we’d see a lot more openings of boxes with negative EVs. But no one cares about those boxes because they aren’t hype moneymakers. People aren’t buying into breaks just to get lucky. They’re gambling real money trying to make more money by getting lucky. That’s the reality of box breaks.
I’m not policing how people spend their money. If you want to buy into a break and gamble for some fun, by all means go ahead. But understand the nature of what you’re buying into, and that most - not all - box breakers are not honest with their customers. Understand the odds of making your money back is slim, even on WotC breaks. Understand why the breaker is charging the prices they are, and what you’re getting out of it.
In short: don’t be a gambling addict. If you are, its ok, but denying it isn’t the answer. Get help and recognize that not everyone around you is working for your best interest. After all, in a free market such as this, profit is the greatest motivator.
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I am not a fan of bashing breaks for “gambling”. If you call that gambling, isn’t buying a box from the store or online gambling? If I buy a $4 pack of cards from the store, why am I buying it? I am buying it for the chance to pull one of the chase cards. If I pull a non-holo rare, I am losing money on that pack, but if I get the chase card I want, I am pulling more value from the pack than the pack itself. That is exactly the same as buying in to a break. In sports cards, people buy into a break based on teams. You can buy the New England Patriots, the Chicago Bulls, the New York Yankees, etc. You are gambling that you will get a good card from that team just as much as I am gambling that I will pull a chase card from my $4 pack of pokemon cards. How is one worse than the other?
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Strictly in terms of gambling, they are both equally as bad. I’m not calling opening a pack gambling, it IS gambling. I was speaking about box breaks and box breaks only, but the opinions I already stated reflect my opinions on TCGs as a whole. They are inherently predatory and most people are too afraid or too addicted to admit it.
I don’t like gambling, so I don’t regularly open packs to “get the chase card I want” - I just buy singles. To me, the dopamine surge of pulling a good card isn’t worth the theoretically unlimited amount of money I would have to spend to actually pull it. Opening packs in attempts to complete sets (especially now, with modern set lists) is a waste of my money. If I opened a booster box of Chilling Reign, I’d get almost (but not all) C/UC/R, a ton of bulk, at most 36/136 reverse holos, a couple holos, Vs, FAs, a VMAX, and a SR/HR/AA, though there’s no telling which. I could get a box with the best cards in the set or the worst, and I’d either go positive or lose my money tremendously. Or, for the same price of a box, I could buy ALL C/UC/R/H/RH, doubles of most Vs, a few full arts and a few VMAX (with no bulk). I’d say nearly completing the standard set (before full arts) is a way better use of my money than buying a booster box.
Opening packs is fun but again, people need to recognize it for what it is: gambling. Gambling can be fun, but I like putting my money into something actually worth the price I paid. If the price of all the dud packs someone bought is worth the experience of pulling a card they want, and they can afford to keep doing so in the future, then let them keep gambling away. As long as they know what they’re doing.
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I have no idea why there seem to be this group think going on where people see late 2019/early 2020 prices as some kind of imaginary floor and anything dropping anywhere close to that signals the literal death of the hobby. People have been drinking the “correction” kool aid for so long they take it as gospel.
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People overestimate the effect of how 90s kids becoming adults is going to flood the market with money. Sure, it’s probably going up, most of us agree on that, but many (most?) of the people with high levels of genuine interest in this stuff are already involved and have made adjustments and sacrifices over the years to stay involved, NOT thinking “hey once I hit 38 and have my Phd in theoretical nuclear fusion/crypto billionaire I’m gonna spend 200K a year on my beloved Pokemon hobby that I haven’t engaged in since late 2001”. The degree to which this is going to happen is vastly overestimated, I fear. Also, with increased income comes an increased number options. Many people would rather spend 500K on a cabin by the lake or a big boat than on Pokemon even if they love it.
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Bro if you think selling packs of cards with make-believe monsters on them is “inherently predatory” you need to go outside and touch grass; maybe look up at the sky and reflect a little bit. With your convoluted definition, anything that involves chance at all must be predatory. Everyone with an IQ higher than a shovel understands that opening a pack of cards is technically “gambling” because it is a risk that involves a reward, but if you think Nintendo is a predator because you “get mostly bulk”, you are in the wrong hobby. If the pokemon company just sold singles to whoever wanted them, the demand would fall to zero. No one would want a Charizard chase card that they’re selling from their website for $2.99 with unlimited print runs. Even though you only buy singles, the prices that you pay, and the value that the card you are buying holds is due to that “predatory gambling” aspect. It is difficult to acquire in some capacity, which makes people want it.
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The question of “why would you pay a premium to have someone open a pack on stream?” reminds me a lot of a question I used to hear often about supporting Twitch streamers: “why would you donate/subscribe and pay real money to just watch someone playing a video game?”
And if you’re one of the people who doesn’t understand why people do that it’s been my experience there isn’t really a way to explain it to make you understand. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I think the issue for me isn’t that it’s gambling per se. Most people buying into box breaks understand that it’s gambling in the terms of the cards that you pull. The issues for me start to arise when the box breaker is either intentionally or unintentionally misleading on how bad of a gamble you’re really taking.
Probably the most blatant is only quoting PSA 10 prices for certain cards or otherwise implying that all the cards you’ll get are automatic PSA 10s. Like, is it possible to get a PSA 10 quality card? Yes. But it’s probably more likely you’ll pull an offcenter card with 2 print lines and a corner ding. Not to mention that you can’t even get cards graded by PSA at all unless you want to cough up the $300 for super express, but most of the buyers would probably run for the hills if the streamer said “last sold as a mint raw copy for $X”
This is obvious as a risk of opening (vintage) sealed product to like everyone here, but it might not be to the people buying into these. Whether it’s the responsibility of the buyer to fully educate themselves those risks or the responsibility of the box breaker to explain those risks to their audience is maybe up for debate, but there is certainly a knowledge gap between the box breaker and some of the people buying in that the seller benefits from financially.
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Not really much to understand. If people enjoy it, by all means, enjoy undisturbed by those of us that don’t. The assumption is that many people engaging in these box breaks are actuallynot enjoying it, but go along with it because they feel they have no other option. Which is not hard to understand. The market is a mess, breakers vacuum the market for boxes, the unweighed packs from trusted sources are depleted as a result. Simple calculus. Then you add a few secondhand lies about social relevance and “building your brand” (lol), and then you sell it to lonely neckbeards with peyronie’s and cabin-fevered hypeculture acrobats. The rest goes to collectors at a loss for where to find legitimate packs.
And, mock-empiricism and false equivalence aside, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, just as it is reasonable to assume that people enjoy chewing their own food, kissing their own girlfriends and opening their own Christmas presents. Sure, people like watching other people do those things as well. So what? Some people enjoy taking a cheesegrater to their private parts, assuming that many don’t isn’t exactly a conspiracy lol.
The social element is not to my personal preference, I see nothing but a disheveled rabble of strangers and frenemies pecking away at each other in a chatbox whilst some perfectly manscaped etherium-dealer is digitally cucking them. A week in segregation at USP Atlanta sounds about as socially nourishing.
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thank you for actually reading my post and not just assuming I am a box break hater
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Or maybe people just enjoy the experience and that’s why it’s popular. We don’t need to invent a new form of Stockholm syndrome to explain it.
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I think, if anything, it’s vastly underestimated for the high end of the market. The average WotC collector is currently somewhere between 26 and 31 years old, if I had to guess. For the EX Series, that range is probably somewhere between 22 and 28. I’m going to simplify things and say, for the sake of argument, that the average collector is 28 (actual number could be ±2)
Naturally, the market is stratified along lines of net worth. People buying more expensive cards have more money to spend on cardboard. People who have more money to spend on cardboard have more discretionary income. People who have more discretionary income have higher net worths. Of course, there are outliers to these generalizations, but there’s obviously going to be an extremely strong correlation between the amount spent on hobbies and net worth.
(Note that I’m speaking here about the high-end of the market – not necessarily the ultra-high end, but anything in the top 2-3%) Let’s make a conservative assumption that the typicalperson buying cards in the top 2-3% of the market is at or above the 90th percentile in terms of net worth for individuals their age.
Now here’s the important info: the 90th percentile net worth of a 28-year old in the U.S. is ~$190,000. The 90th percentile net worth of a 38-year old in the U.S. is **~$600,000.**It’s tough to understate the impact this could have on the high-end of the market. There are, of course, many assumptions here. In 10 years, will 38-year olds have similar interest in Pokemon cards as 28-year olds do today? Assuming yes to this is a total guess. But here’s the thing: even if 38-year olds in 10 years have half the interest that 28-year olds do today, prices on the high-end will still be higher. Now, of course, some items that are in the top 5% of the market right now may not still be in the top 5% of the market 10 years from now. There are, as you can see, a lot of variables that complicate this sort of analysis, but my basic point stands: the impact could be huge.
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