I see people fighting over wotc boosters on ebay, mostly base set, I’d like to punt on a few if I ever had extra extra cash (they’re all pretty expensive but I guess it’s like a lottery), but there can only be so many left at this point, ignoring the psa slabbed ones which I don’t really get why people do that but I’m new to the hobby.
How many more years before they’re all opened or slabbed and there are no more on ebay, also is ebay the best place to get them, read about fakes and ebay has little quality control.
@c0ll3ct0r, @salaryyy,
that’s good to know, didn’t know there were so many still in packs after all these years, would like to start up a collection, although that won’t be cheap but it’s something I’ll enjoy.
Base set has been printed so much that there will always be unopened packs from some corners of earth no matter how much people would ever open them, and not all bought packs are going to be graded or opened but just sitting in one’s collection just as plain boosters, and there will always also be collectors who decide to sell something from their collection including those boosters
I can guarantee there will always be at least 1 sealed aquapolis blister pack somewhere in my collection. Maybe one day itll be the last pokemon item left unopened and i can trade it for a picaso or da vinci
This pack is 20 years older than base and still available: ebay.us/S27Eb6
Pokemon is very popular, along with openings, which can accelerate the decrease of supply. But we have seen more sealed product in the past few years than the previous 10.
There will always be a ton of packs kept sealed from every set. When a specific set has a lot of packs opened up, there is less supply of sealed packs, and the price on the remaining sealed packs go up. This increase in price will keep the remaining packs from being opened, or atleast slow down the opening rate. Also, when the packs from that same set increase in price, suddenly you see more supply available from people who had sealed packs stashed away for years. Sounds goofy as I said supply goes down then supply goes up, but it balances itself out
It’s quite inconceivable that we could run out of WOTC boosters in general anytime this century. However, it does seem plausible that among all WOTC cards, there are at least some that will eventually (within decades) no longer exist in PSA 10 quality within the remaining sealed product. I’m thinking of the especially difficult ones to grade. We don’t have to run out of sealed product to run out of sealed PSA 10 examples of specific cards, it’s just we will never know if or when such “extinctions” occur.
Thats an interesting opinion but id also like to hear what leads you to believe it? If the cards in the sealed packs/boxes survived in gem mint condition up til now 20 years later, how come they wont last another 20, or even 200 if properly stored? Even sets known for issues should be fine, its not like the issues get worse, and those sets still get the occasional 10, id assume relatively consistently compared to the past. Give or take grading “standards” and storage conditions, you might find a difference in the grades, but the condition shouldnt change if the standards remain the same and the storage is proper, or for the case of 200 years from now, cutting edge… unless im missing something
I actually didn’t consider natural decay due to aging and storage conditions because I don’t expect those to have much of an effect. Though, it is an interesting additional consideration when we start talking about many decades or even centuries…
Rather, in my original post I was simply thinking about the sheer number of cards in the WOTC era and the known issues in a number of the sets.
Take Legendary Collection for example. There are 110 reverse holos. Even pack fresh a lot of them are hard to grade in a 10. Suppose I opened tons of packs and graded every reverse holo. How many Legendary Collection booster packs would I need to open in order to have a 90% chance that I’ve obtained the entire set in PSA 10? If the world’s supply of sealed Legendary Collection booster packs ever falls below that specific number, then that would mean there’s a 10% chance one of the cards in Legendary Collection has gone “extinct” from all the world’s sealed product.
It’s much easier for that event to occur than it is for us to run out of all Legendary Collection booster packs entirely. Suppose the answer to the above question is 20 boxes (I have no idea). The world’s supply will drop to 20 boxes much sooner than it will drop to 0. That’s the basis for my opinion. There are enough WOTC cards with enough known issues that it seems reasonable to imagine this scenario happening to SOME card in the next 20-50 years as the world’s supply of sealed product continues to decrease.
Things often seem to disappear into a black hole over the centuries, usually that is due to time + crisis. War, civil war, famine, natural disasters, cultural repression, dictatorships, crashes, in general any event that temporarily dissolves all the middle classes or results in military conflict.
I think people like to think that we live in the age of preservation due to our technological and social advancement. Those very same advancements is why a military conflict could turn it topsy turvy in an instant, drastically reducing the volume of artefacts like trading cards. We’re not the first generation to overestimate our expiration date. Every guesstimation I’ve heard on this subject assumes that the future of human history is going to be like the last 20 years. The chances of that happening is incredibly miniscule.
In a way that makes sense, but even if we ever think we know the “odds” of a card grading a 10 from sealed, we never truly know. Ive come across boxes with none of the typical print issues, and boxes with all of them, just as its possible the last sealed left are flawed its possible that its all going to contain the perfectly printed cards the people opening hope for.
I think we would reach museum/ultra high end preservation status before we reach the point that opening is never going to yield high grades
I’d imagine certain boosters, like 1st edition base, will eventually reach MTG alpha status where prices are steep and supply on sites like ebay will be sporadic at best
^This. I bet that technically, there will always be some WOTC boosters out there that are unopened. Maybe they were bought on Jan. 9, 199 (the first day of the english release of the base set), and then forgotten about and placed in a box, and maybe that box is in a long-forgotten attic or storage facility.
I know this is a bit of a smartass answer to OPs question, but it’s not intended to be. There will always, somewhere, be some sealed WOTC boosters out there. Some collectors out there will never open their sealed boosters or boxes, for any reason (who knows that their descendants will do, but that’s a different story). Some have been forgotten in a sealed box in the corner of an abandoned warehouse; or card store, or storage unit, or family home. And there are certainly collectors out there like smpratte, russ, and TCG gaming, and others like them that have a stash of this stuff, who will only sell or open them when the time is right (like, when a booster is 2-3k a pop.) Who knows. Supply to the general market will restrict over time, but it will never be truly gone.
