I Hate Scaling

There’s a particular reason I stopped buying trading cards in single packs and started buying trading cards in unopened booster box sets and that reason is scaling.

Just in case it isn’t clear by the title of this post, I HATE SCALING.

I hate scaling simply because it goes against the principle of collectible cards being packaged in BLIND packs and it takes advantage of the people who actually are clueless about scaling (a lot of young kids and their parents) and/or TRUST that they have just as good of a chance of pulling something good when in truth, all they can pull out of a scaled box is crap.

Trading card packs – since their appearance in blind packs starting from way back when – were always meant to be a surprise. Blind packs are, quite literally, BLIND packs and in an ideal situation, everyone – kids, teenagers, adults, the hardcore, the beginners, and the curious – has a chance of plucking out a pack that’s good, meh, or kind of junky.

But when scalers have gone through a box of booster packs (especially for card sets that have more noticeable weight differences between their rares and non-rares), the tables are turned upside down and it is almost guaranteed that anyone who encounters a box that has been opened and scaled through already is going to get nothing but a lot of junk.

I’ve collected cards for years now and have seen my share of scaled boxes in various retail settings and have encountered my share of ill-reputed card dealers and sellers who will still try to sell the leftover card packs as unscaled and untouched.

And that brings me back to the topic of this post.

I stopped buying singles from opened booster boxes because I got smart and realized that my local stores were getting hit by bigtime scalers. To combat that issue, I started buying the unopened booster boxes themselves fresh from the store’s inventory and the problem of scaled card packs – especially Yu-Gi-Oh! cards – all but disappeared.

That is, until I decided to take a chance by buying unopened booster boxes online.

Unopened, my ASS, and another lesson learned which is:

Unless you know you can trust the online card dealer in question, simply don’t buy ANY card packs – loose or boxed – from them at all, period.

And really? I should have already known and in that particular instance, I plead a case of stupidity and ill-placed faith.

As booster boxes aren’t typically glued shut, it doesn’t take much creativity or wrangling to scale the contents of multiple boxes and fill the boxes being sold with junk packs to resell.

So yeah. Definitely a lesson learned and a lesson I won’t forget.