Does anyone know when pack weighing starting becoming a thing?
I have a PSA graded 1st edition base set booster pack with an old cert number and happened to stumble upon this video by TCA Gaming which got me thinking (exact time stamp linked): A 6 FIGURE Pokemon Collection - OVER $100,000 !!! - YouTube
When I purchased it for the art I assumed it would be a light pack, but it would be interesting to know if perhaps it may be unweighed if people weren’t weighing packs back when it was graded.
TCA Gaming already mentions in that video that it would have been before weighing started, and my cert number is older than the one in the video, but yeah interested if anyone knows when that kicked off.
I definitely don’t plan on cracking it open or anything like that and I’m not sure if weighing is possible with the inclusion of the PSA case, but thought it would be cool to know if there could potentially be a holo inside - I guess I just like knowing that it could be anything.
Hoping someone that knows the history of pack weighing can help out!
I bought a large set of inventory from a 2000 era local card dealer that would do mass box openings. He also told me he would pay someone that owned a shop to only sell him heavy packs (and the owner was selling people light packs most likely without their knowledge). I think pack weighing has existed since base set came out to my knowledge.
I remember going into a card shop with my dad in 2003 and my dad suggesting that maybe the packs with the good cards will be heavier. So he took some out of an open box and try to weigh them by hand haha. Shop owner came over (nice guy but boy he could he yammer on for hours) told us not to do that because weighing packs was actually a thing.
I was aware of pack weighing when I was watching PrimeTimePokemon in 2009, so… most of the time cards have been reasonably valuable (incentive). And from the sound of it, sooner lol.
When did it take over may be the more effective question. I’d say up until 2014-15ish if I bought vintage packs from an eBay seller at random, there was a greater chance they were unweighed than weighed, and most would not think to use “unweighed” as an adjective. I bought ex series and cheap 1st Ed Fossil / Jungle on eBay around 2012-2015 and opened all with regular 1:3 holo pull rates. There were certainly people weighing these kind of packs but you had a good shot at unweighed.
For something like 1st Ed base they were likely weighed on eBay far before then, but at this time period it was hardly worth it for packs I was buying since nearly all the holos were under ten bucks anyway and there wasn’t a huge market for the heavy packs. By 2016 when the cheapest ex series packs exceeded $20, buying from a random seller would likely lead to weighed light packs. Around this time I bought a big lot of 50 mixed ex packs and my holo pulls were terrible. By 2017 most packs were advertised as heavy / light with the assumption “unweighed” meant light.
The question is not, when did pack weighing start.
The question is, when did it become Uber profitable to weigh packs? I bought my first ed base set packs back in 2013, when they were 200$ a pop. I bought 4 from the same person. One of the 4 were heavy. The earlier you bought the packs, the better chances of them being unweighted are. That’s about all I can say.
I also bought 42 unlimited fossil packs for 200$ back in 2014. Pulled roughly 15 holos. That’s because the packs were 5$ and no one cared about unlimited fossil holos then.
I come from the sports card side of things. Weighing packs is just like pack searching. It’s frowned upon in the sports hobby world.
The Pokémon community seems to welcome it with open arms. It can open the door to being profitable yes, but also opens the door for scammers, flippers and dirt bags in my opinion.
One of my good friends who knows how all in I’ve been on CCGs the last year recently told me he remembers as a kid that some packs that were heavier had the holos and some didn’t the lights. So he would always hand weigh packs and got good at it. He was 9 years old.
Pack weighing has been a thing from the first day of the hobby. Lol I found an article from 1991 in regards to the sports card trading world that described the various techniques collectors were using to guarantee better odds at higher pull rates… and this was a thing in the early 90s. Best believe game store owners cracking packs for the singles knew about this in 1999.
When I was a kid in 1999, a friendly female cashier at a store told me and my friends that holo packs are heavier and we could attempt to feel the heavy packs by feeling out 2 packs with our bare hands. It sounds crazy but I think we were successful at it without a scale.
So pack weighing has been around from the start.
I remember my sister brought the kitchen scale from home to Target for trying to weigh packs once, and she got Empoleon Level X. I believe that weighing packs were always a thing for kids trying to get rare cards.
