How do trading card companies (TOPPS, Pokémon, MTG, etc.) fairly distribute rare cards across all the manufactured packages?
In: 379
Well long story short, they aren’t fair. When buying cards for a TCG online the biggest prevailing advice is to either buy singles or to buy factory sealed booster boxes and never to buy loose packs. Even if you order a factory sealed booster box and it looks like a repackage you’re better off not opening it and contacting whatever customer service options you have. Buying packs can generally be considered a gamble and your return will always be less than what you paid for the packs but bad actors have taken that gambling and made it a guaranteed loss for you.
Everyone else is getting to how things are done mechanically which is interesting but we care more about what that all means to the end consumer. The sheets they are talking about, for instance, are going to be the same every time for that set. The way the cards go into the hoppers is the same and the way the cards are packed up is the same and the way those packs get distributed into boxes is the same. This is random enough for general use but bad actors get involved and ruin everything.
Those bad actors open a lot of boost boxes. Enough that they figure out the sorting algorithms the manufacturers use. They can take any booster box of a set they have cracked, open a few select packs, and then determine which packs in the box will have valuable cards. They then open those packs to resell the valuable cards and then sell the garbage packs loosely or in randomly sized bundles on Ebay or an equivalent. This can sound like tin foil hat crap to some people but it’s a legitimate problem across multiple communities.
For example, in Magic the Gathering you can’t predict where the foil cards will show up but you could predict the rare slot in the packs. In recent years they’ve also been actively working to make their algorithms harder to predict as well as creating tons of alternate artworks and rarities to every set distributed throughout them like foils as well as creating 3 separate types of card packs all with their own rarity distributions and sorting methods to create them. Even still it is only recommended to buy sealed booster boxes though because it’s really just a numbers game and the patterns for every box will be cracked with enough data.
Pokemon on the other hand has been struggling with this so much that local game stores have needed to take extra precautions when selling single packs. My game store in particular had to start opening boxes in front of people, shuffling the packs around, and had to stop letting people “pick their packs” because a 14 year old kid had done the research and bought out the good packs from probably 5-6 different booster boxes. The parents were spending hundreds of dollars on pokemon cards for their kids to sit there and get sad that they didn’t open a single worthwhile card. They would spend $100 to open literally just $10 worth of cards and that’s only if you consider the value of the bulk which you can’t sell to most places. Then they started buying the full booster boxes and were shocked at how much better their finds were on average and put 2 and 2 together. This wasn’t a decade ago either it was only after in-store play was reopened after covid.
TL&DR:
Don’t buy loose packs for any TCG online. Only buy factory sealed booster boxes. If you get a “factory sealed” box that is clearly a repackage then don’t open it and start your ticket with customer service. Bad actors have mapped out booster boxes allowing them to remove any packs containing valuable cards. Buying loose packs is no longer a gamble but a guaranteed loss. There is no TCG that is completely mapping proof although some will claim to be.
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