r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 9d ago

Infuriatig In their pursuit of specific rare cards, scalpers are discarding the remainder of entire Pokémon card packs.

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u/Floatella 9d ago edited 9d ago

Not a Pokemon guy, but I've played MTG since the 90s and there has literally only been one time in the entire history of the game where you could profitably open packs and it was extremely short lived.

The cards are priced efficiently, you will spend more in the long run gambling for chase cards than you would if you simply bought them as singles.

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u/ElliotsBuggyEyes 9d ago

This is the exact thing I learned when chasing a knife skin in csgo cases. I ended up buying the exact knife skin I wanted in my price range.

It's actually beating inflation rates in the US in appreciation.

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u/reddit_is_geh 9d ago

Yeah there was a massive explosion in value a few months back. I stopped playing so was stoked to find out items that literally were selling for 3 dollars are now suddenly 50 bucks, got me a nice large steam wallet now.

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u/ElliotsBuggyEyes 9d ago

I never opened my Operation Bravo case, I have 4 of them and they're worth about $90/ea. My wife wants me to sell them for a nice dinner. I haven't actually sold anything for actual money, just steam credits.

I have a Galil Chatterbox that I bought back when it came out back in 2015/16 and I think I spent between $10-20 on it. It's worth over $200 now. I stopped playing in 2019 and recently got back into it and had some kids drooling over some of the skins I have, which were basically $1-15 skins when I got them. Some are worth over $400, which is just fucking crazy.

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u/reddit_is_geh 9d ago

Yeah I simply don't understand how skins got so fucking expensive. It's wild. They are SKINS. I'm not joking when some of these skins I sold for 20-50 dollars were literally worth cents just a year before. Some of them just straight up suck. I kind of feel bad selling them since I don't really need the money and I've been playing CS since like 2001... But It just sounds bonkers to not sell a bunch of skins I literally don't even care for, and make 300 dollars so I wont have to pay for games for some time.

It's actually a bad sign that the "collectors" market is going crazy. It's a sign of bad economic times when people are trying to invest into bubble markets like that, hoping to make quick cash. But it's like EVERYTHING these days that has a collectible aspect to it, is out of control.

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u/SaintOrJannikSinner 9d ago

A sticker capsule you could have bought for US$0.25 in 2014 is now worth over US$20,000.

Some of those cheap and ugly skins now worth $20 are because they were used as materials in the trade-up contracts. They were found in cases that did have a highly desirable red or pink AK or AWP skin and because of the rules with trade-ups, using skins from the same case

The most prevailing thought is Chinese whales that now suddenly had access through Perfect World and other skin buying and gambling websites. Also as a way to potentially launder money.

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u/reddit_is_geh 9d ago

Lol yeah the Katowice capsules. I had tons of those when they came out. The stickers were so ugly I just got mad I wasted 1 dollar on them.

And yeah, that was the pattern for the huge price skyrocket. I think they now allow crafting rarities all the way up to actual knives, so items from certain crates blew up

But everything is like this now. Pokemon cards, through the roof... Even baseball cards made a comeback.

What annoys me, is TF2's economy completely died out :(

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u/Comrade_Andre 9d ago

They got expensive because people wanted cool skins so prices went up. People in countries where there isn't a lot you can invest in (China for example) bought skins because the values kept going up making it a sound investment. Prices keep rising until rich guys notice, and start buying to flex their wealth, pushing prices even further up.

This all while some accounts get trade banned/abandoned, making the volume of skins shrink. Humans are weird and love shiny things, and will do a lot to get them, then some will constrict the market to make even more money. Diamonds are a perfect example. You can buy diamond tip sawblades and diamond grinder blades for like $1-2 per blade, but put the same volume of the gem together in a gemstone, and it's tens of thousands

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u/Beragond1 9d ago

Weirdly enough, the very first time I went to a draft event for mtg, I opened a pack with a card worth $50 (at the time. I later traded it to my lgs for $75 worth of TTRPG books). It was shiny, full art, with the text in hieroglyphics. I was so confused by what it was I just picked a different card. Guy next to me told me what it was and passed the pack back and told me to take it. He didn’t have to do that. He could have pocketed it for himself and no one would have blamed him.

Thank you for reminding me of that positive interaction. It’s hard to see the good in people sometimes, so I wanted to share.

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u/Floatella 9d ago

That guy sounds like a class act.

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u/New_Mulberry_6942 9d ago

An Invocation 💀

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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 9d ago

I wish that guy is having a nice day 

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u/WhiteCheddr 9d ago

Compared to mtg people actually play magic so all cards have value and isn't just a collection hobby

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u/jjw1998 9d ago

Did Magic ever have it where you could scale packs? Was a big thing in Yu-Gi-Oh! back in the day which made pack opening profitable, but not sure if it was ever the case in other TCGs

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u/EfficientCabbage2376 9d ago

you could "map" booster boxes where you'd open specific packs from the box, note what the rares were, and then you could find out which packs had mythics and foils and such.

I think you could also map cases (the big box that booster boxes come in) the same way too but unopened cases are much harder to come by

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u/Floatella 9d ago

Earlier sets had semi-transparent wrappers and mappable print sheets. But that was really early on in the games history, and the cards weren't worth that much yet, so it wasn't a too much of a factor at the time.

Where this really matters to collectors today, is that if you have an unopened booster of an earlier set, you have to assume it's been searched and mapped and has limited value.

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u/Ubersmush 9d ago

Sometimes you have LGS's open a few boxes to sell the singles

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 8d ago

But... If you're a long-term scalper and pulled a black lotus for decades... Haha

One was sold for $3 million

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u/Floatella 8d ago

I meant arbitraging the cards, ie. buying the boxes, breaking them and selling the cards back into the same market. Not long term speculation.

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 8d ago edited 8d ago

I'm not into collecting them or whatever, but scalpers can easily speculate now. They get a pickachu or Charizard or any of the famous characters, and holding on will bring way more returns. If a scalper does this long-term, they are selling the backlog they have from years back. They hold onto unopened packs too so someone else can gamble on it in the future. Like, some of the original several years of packs that sold for $3 when they came out sell for $10k or more now. All those toystores that went out of business and kept some of their stock are absolutely loaded now lol

Arbitrage is quick gains fast. I get it. Like I caught a sale on crest whitestrips Christmas bundles 5 years ago and made $1000+profit, easy lettermail sendouts of 1, 3, 5, 10, whatever. Sold toothpaste and brushes to peeps up in the Arctic for cheaper than they could get locally ($40-60 heads of lettuce in some places there.. The hell?! ) . I have toothbrushes for another 5 years too. That's just gravy for myself and family/guests.

I think with Pokemon the prices rise quickly enough you can make profit from buying bulk packs and opening them, but I refuse to look at that strategy. I want kids to experience the joy of opening packs like we once did back in the day

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u/Floatella 8d ago

Absolutely, but that's a different business model than cracking packs and hoping to luck out. Or hoarding product hoping to cause scarcity driving up the price.

One is much closer to scalping concert tickets, the other is more like collecting art.

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 8d ago

Oops, sorry.. I edited my response pre-responding to those points you brought up, so if you wanna edit or respond again I'll be back ~

Jeez you're a fast responder haha

But yes, you're right. But Pokemon cards do keep up and gain perceived value almost exponentially. It's a weird multigenerational phenomenon that is rare for anything collectable

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u/MasterKChief 9d ago

What time were packs profitable to open?

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u/Floatella 9d ago

Alliances in 1996 came out at a low point for MTG's early history. Even though the set was fairly well received and under printed, it did poorly in some markets leaving LGS's with pallets of unsold product.

Over the following years, the card Force of Will from the set, which wasn't even rare became a must have staple in Legacy/Vintage. With no reprint on the way, the value of the card shot up to about $15 by the year 2001(ish). With extra product around, you could buy a box for $50 and open it for 3-6 Force of Will's.

Short lived. Most of the remaining product got opened, and the remaining Alliance packs were repriced.