(Tldr at the bottom)
Since a couple of yours I started to collect more and more sealed Japanese booster boxes, the older good stuff. My main goal is to complete all booster boxes between Base set and Neo 4.
Until yesterday I had all the boxes except the unicorn, Neo 4 (contact me if you have one, haha).
I wasn’t really sure about one of my boxes, the Gym 2 box I bought somewhere at the start of this year. The seal was not open at both ends as you would expect from an old Japanese box, they are quite different compared to English boxes. Instead it was sealed all the way around and the seal had a goofy feel to it.
I bought it from a trustworthy seller in Italy so at the time I didn’t think much of it. At that time there was another Gym 2 box on eBay with a similar seal as well. That seller also didn’t really know why it had that seal but oh well.
Fast forward to yesterday, with all the fake seal talk, and I was moving some stuff for long time storage, I came across the Gym 2 box. I didn’t want to put it away without knowing for sure it was a legitimate sealed box. Through the flap of the box I could see Gym 2 packs so that seemed to be good. But when I pressed the box, the middle was firm but both sides I could press really far without feeling any cards or resistance.
I opened the box because I was too afraid it would contain some lose packs and junk…
To my relief the box was filled with 60, good looking, genuine, Japanese Gym 2 packs! But when I started pulling the packs from the box two packs were glued together it seemed. I pulled them out and they were held together by a sticker with 300 yen on it. Then it all made sense to me (well for a larger part at least)!
The packs must have been printed in the time the prices of the packs were raised. So after the price raise they (the official producer of te boxes I presume) probably opened a lot of boxes to add a sticker on the packs to raise the prizes! After that they relabeled the packs they “re-sealed” the boxes and sold them.
Very curious if anyone ever hear about this before, or if anyone has a similar older Japanese sealed box with a strange seal.
Tldr: Thought my Japanese gym 2 box was re-sealed. It appears that the manufacturer put stickers on the packs at the time of the price raise of the booster packs to 300 yen and “re-sealed” the box themselves. So different seal on the box but it was all gooood.
