Tuesday, February 24, 2009

One Last Comment On Hot Packs

After just receiving another email from the administrator of a hot pack website to publicize on here, I want to offer my last and final comments on hot packs before anyone else gets any ideas. Either way, here is the previous post on the subject.

See, I dont think pack searching and hot packs are the bane of the hobby like they used to be, only because the cards you pull arent as rare anymore. Its pretty obvious that you wont make much money selling the packs or the jersey cards anymore because the suckers just dont care about those type of cards as much as they used to. Plus, with the economy being down, and the amount of disposable income being down, people arent as likely to take a chance on a thing like a hot pack. The same could be said about regular packs, but no one feels as bad about legitimately purchasing a non-searched pack, so naturally the risk and reward is much easier to deal with in a morally positive person.

As for the Pack Searchers and hot pack generators themselves, morality and playing the game by the rules isnt as big of an issue to them, and that is why I wont disagree with people who think that those people are huge fucking douches. Its never a cool thing to cheat, and even though every person has taken the unfair advantage at one point in their life, most people dont make a practice of it. To then offer your expertise to others based on the premise of cheating, makes this an even douchier situation than it already is.

See, here is what it comes down to. If there is money to be made, there is someone who will exploit the suckers to make that cash, no matter the industry. Pack searchers and hot packs will be around no matter what the companies or the bloggers do. So, even though I am posting the last article on hot packs for the forseeable future, dont think they are going to go away or that the practice will stop. Just like when security companies find a way to deter hackers, they always find a way. Lucky for us, when you spend 3 dollars on a pack and sell it for 5, rather than the 10 it used to go for, its going to act as a natural deterrant until the next scam comes along.

Sadly, as I have said numerous times on here, there is a sucker born every minute, and you know these guys love those odds. Wonderful.

4 comments:

  1. I don't blame the pack searchers for this problem as much as I blame the card companies for making the packs easy for them to search. This problem has been around for a while, and the card companies really should have been able to solve it with better packaging by now.

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  2. I figured that guy spammed everyone with his guest blog offer. I found something extraordinarily interesting while looking over the site so I think I'm going to do a post later tonight.

    I don't care about retail pack searchers as long as they don't destroy the packs like the idiot near me who scratches all the packs with his thumbnail. It's the hobby dealers who pull the hot packs and then sell you the dregs from the box at over retail price that I want strung up. Although one time I did encounter one joker at a flea market who pulled all the hot packs out of his boxes and sold them at a premium, then blew out all the rest of the packs for a buck a pop. That seemed kind of pointless to me, but he was fair about it at least.

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  3. Actually, the newest scam is already here. No longer content to just sell generic "hot packs", I have now seen several eBay listings for "Guaranteed Gold Refractor Auto Hot Pack" and "Guaranteed Superfractor 1/1 Hot Pack". The best part of the listing is where most of them say "Who could it be? Posey? Beckham?" Wtf? If they know it's a Super, how do they not know who the player is? And these packs sell for $80-100. If it was any half-way decent player, these same asshats would be selling the Gold or Super for $500-800.

    Yet, like Gellman & good ole P.T. said, um....something about stupid people.

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  4. I know how they do it because I have sold them myself. Sometimes, you can know it's a gold refractor auto without knowing who the player is.

    Basically, the reason you'd sell the pack is that you might pull a $500-800 card, but it might be a $50 card. If you can sell the pack for $100 and let someone else take the risk (and receive the potential reward), you come out ahead more often than not.

    There's nothing stupid about either side of that deal.

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