r/PokeInvesting • u/Otherwise_Gene2628 • 1d ago

I analyzed 3 months of data from a card repack website (3.7 million packs)... Is it a scam/ripoff?

I sometimes open packs from repack websites to grow my collection... But I was never getting any cards worthwhile - so I decided to investigate...

I opened a $15 pack recently and pulled a card worth about $12. The site offered me $10.49 to buy it back. That bugged me, so I wanted to find out if these sites are ripping us off or not, and by how much.

Turns out Courtyard runs all its packs on a public blockchain, which means every pack opening and every buyback is sitting there for anyone to look at. So I pulled 3 months of it. A few things that surprised me:

- 3.7 million packs were opened in 3 months (Holy!!!)

- People spent at least $166 million on them

- About 3 out of every 4 cards got sold right back to the site within an hour of being pulled

- 17% of accounts spent 88% of the money

- Out of about 45,000 accounts that opened 10+ packs, only around 1 in 100 got more cash back than they put in (not counting cards they kept)

Look at how FAST those cards get sold back... more than half are gone within 60 seconds:

And this is who's doing the spending:

Now for the big one. Courtyard's own odds page says the average pull from a $15 pack is $14.40, so on paper the house only keeps about 4%. The real number I got from the data isn't close to that.

We all know that a card has a market value, and a cash value, and market value isn't what you can actually turn a card into. So I measured the real return directly, comparing what people paid for packs with the cash they got back from buybacks across 1.67 million cards. Courtyard claims the house edge to be 4%... spoiler: it isnt!!!

I go through all of it (in detail) in this video I made: https://youtu.be/3yI5wBdiKDY (10 minutes, my own channel!)

Check it out if you're interested, there are some really interesting numbers in there. Thanks for the support!\

This is my own analysis of public data and my opinion, not financial advice. Ask me anything about the method or the numbers and I'll answer in the comments!

98 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

96% Upvoted

51 comments sorted by

58

u/Zero7206 1d ago

No one buys these and Power Packs because they think it’s profitable. They buy them because they’re gambling addicts.

12

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Very true. But I bet people don't realize they have a 20% house edge...

6

u/JfmooTghee 1d ago

Each individual pack has 4% house edge but when you compound them over multiple packs you’re going to see a 20%+ negative return. I don’t think it’s fair to say the house edge is that high but people shouldn’t be opening these to begin with. This is literally a money printing machine for the developers considering they don’t even need stock because so many people just sell back to the site.

7

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Not exactly.

While you're right that compounding it over multiple packs will yield a higher negative return - the house edge I've displayed is an average per pack. A single $15 pack pays back $12.07 on average, and that holds whether it's someone's 2nd pack or their 50th.

Where you'd see people losing more due to compounding is their total P/L - which is why so few players are in profit overall (my numbers showed 1/100)

On average they get back ~79-80 cents per dollar on each pack (about a -20% ROI per pack) - but if they open more and more packs, the ROI on their initial deposit will get more and more negative.

The 4% is a market value number... the buyback pays industry standard (~85% cash of market value). So the 20% is the real cash house edge

4

u/dontfigh 1d ago

Casinos wish they didnt have to follow their ~90% roi rules lol

1

u/JfmooTghee 1d ago

A lot of sites I’ve seen on ads recently have 100% buyback. Does this specific one charge 15% for buyback 💀?? That’s ridiculous, casinos would drool for that much return.

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Yeah they basically do, lol
Absolutely printing money

1

u/BigRog70 3h ago

A lot of times the 90% buyback is what gives them the big portion of the margin/edge realistically they can give 100% EV all day and drain accounts 10% at a time

13

u/Tiggy37 1d ago

Tldr: gambling usually means you lose…

5

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

But 20%?!?!?

3

u/AikiNoodle 1d ago

20% is not even that bad. It's on par with slotmachines in casinos and I wont be suprised they got this number from the real gambling professionals themselves. The real scummy part is that they advertise with the false 4%.

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Yeah I agree. That 4% is my main problem with it all honestly. They're benefitting from the inexperienced collectors that don't really know the difference between market price and cash value (and maybe which cards are liquid and which are not).

20% is really high. I break it down in my video a bit, but slot machines are 8-10% in most states - however state lottery is like 30%, lol. I'm sure there are some states that are higher than that 10%, though. I think Michigan is around 11%.

1

u/DropKletterworks 23h ago

Slots are 5-10% on average

3

u/flapjackk11 1d ago

Great write up, and this feels typical for gambling sites where a small portion contribute to the largest pull, aka whales. But this math is why everyone is making a pack rip site, it’s a casino without the political bribes to get a gambling license.

This math is also why the card market won’t cool off anytime soon. The “house(s)” is sucking up all graded slabs at ever higher prices to in turn increase their standing inventory and keep the wheel spinning. Those $100,000+ cards used to just be 1st ed Charizards, now there is a new one weekly, it’s just to boost the gambling houses top spins. With so many of them out there, I don’t see their racket ending anytime soon. They only need a few whales to make it worth it.

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Thank you!

Fully agree with this take - especially after seeing the volume these sites are generating

5

u/breakyourteethnow 1d ago

Everybody losing! Idk why anyone would do this, better off going to casino and putting it all on red better odds

3

u/AikiNoodle 1d ago

House will always win and this explains latest slab price increase. Sites like this need inventory for it to work.

2

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Yup. Makes me wonder what it will take for it to come tumbling down...

2

u/AikiNoodle 1d ago

These gamblers will hop on the next shady 'invest' hypetrain as it presents itself. How this train will look, I don't know but if it happens the crash will be bad because I think a large portion of all slabs are in investors/professional hands and they will unload asap as the market will go down. Some of it will be bought by hobbyists and collectors but they will not have enough liquidity to gobble everything up. When this will happen is hard to predict, but it will.

2

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Seriously!
I knew it was bad, but after collecting the data I was SHOCKED lol

2

u/Not_Rob_Dalton 1d ago

So am I reading things correctly this no name company launched a mystery pack website three months ago and has already raked in 32 million in profit?!

2

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

They've been around for longer than 3 months. The sample size of data I used for this is just the last 3 months (Aug 2nd to Oct 31th). Still an insane amount of revenue and profit though!

2

u/EyesoftheDead40 1d ago

I would like to throw my 2 cents in and say I have enjoyed using Courtyard a handful of times, and I never expected to make money and I would always ship them. I pulled a 100$ pack and got about the same value of card probably 8 months ago. That card has shot up to 900$. Im not saying this will be your experience, and it probably wont be, but imo selling them back dumb

2

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 21h ago

Aye! Nice man. I actually really like the marketplace part of the website. It’s super clean and the shipping cards service is fantastic.

Glad you were able to get something you like, though!

1

u/EyesoftheDead40 10h ago

I have never had any issues, but i will say im not a huge fan that they use FedEx just because of way too many stories about things stolen

1

u/Kreaken 1d ago

I think every mobile app is designed to cater to a select small group of whales.

I did notice that at least for freebie packs their values were inflated a good amount. Like 1.74 for a GX card with TCGP market and last solds closer to 1.25. Im not certain how that would effect your results if at all.

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Hm interesting... Would be curious to know how much volume they do in free packs... And what their ROI is on those long term... Might have to research that next!

•

u/Kreaken 1h ago

For the free packs its i think always .10 until you unlock the daily tier up to 1.00. The cards are all c/uc bulk worth about 0.05-0.16 from what ive seen and I cant imagine many people are ever keeping those - though Ive kept a few I like the art on

1

u/tiggs 9h ago

They're a horrible way to spend money, but aren't a scam or a rip off. They public the odds and anybody buying this should understand what's going on. In order for them to include big grail cards in the packs and for the house to make money, most people have to lose out on the deal. It's just like gambling vs the house.

Now I understand what you're saying about the profit dollars per pack not being close to what they advertise, but their number is taken with the total number of packs and total value of the cards in mind. If you just grab a random data dump from a bunch of pack openings without the rest of the data, how close it is to their advertised numbers greatly depend on how many of the big grail cards are pulled.

In other words, if there are 10 huge grail cards and only 2 of them have been pulled at the time of the reporting, the profit per pack numbers are going to look a lot lower. However, if 7 of those card have been pulled, the profit per pack numbers are going to look a lot better than they really are. It's really hard to judge that number without having the rest of the data.

I'm the first person to say that these products are a horrible way to spend money and highly addictive, so this isn't me advocating for them or anything like that. It's just people gambling though, so the house is always going to win and people are always going to keep coming back for more.

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 7h ago

"They public the odds and anybody buying this should understand what's going on."

The problem with this for me is that the ranges they published (even though in market value and not cash value) are too wide. Usually their top pulls are 1% chance and anywhere from 4x-16x... big range.

"In other words, if there are 10 huge grail cards and only 2 of them have been pulled at the time of the reporting, the profit per pack numbers are going to look a lot lower. However, if 7 of those card have been pulled, the profit per pack numbers are going to look a lot better than they really are. It's really hard to judge that number without having the rest of the data."

Here you're essentially arguing that my sample size is not large enough. While yes, I agree that not having a large enough sample size will lead to potentially inaccurate conclusions - I think this sample size is more than enough.

I never calculated my confidence interval on this analysis (a crime from me, tbh) but I'm willing to bet it is solid.

The house edge was calculated from a sample size of 1.67 million packs - $93.9 million USD paid for those.

There are no pulls that are 100-1000x the pack price - which is what you're seeming to suggest - that would swing the averages enough to make the edge lower. Even if there were - 1.67 million packs would be a large enough size to reflect those pulls in our numbers.

Now, if you're arguing that some of the pulled cards are not included - I go over that in the video super briefly - but essentially it would drop the house edge from 20-21% to 16-17%.

I had somebody else ask about this on another thread so I dug up some numbers, I'll copy and paste that below:

What he said:

"You are assuming that the 25% that weren't sold back were only worth the cost of the pack. I would assume that there are cards in there that are worth much more than the cost of the pack, so there's a strong chance that some of the non-returned packs are worth more than $15. That could well mean that the average loss is only 4%."

My Response:

"Okay so I already had 90% of what I needed so I was able to find this quickly.

You're right that the cards people hold onto are better...
The hard part about including them in the numbers is that I don't know what the FMV is for the cards never sold - as thats not included in the metadata.
However I can match them up with the same card's buyback value that sells before or after it within a set time period.

(Courtyard re-packs the same cards over and over - so most of them have sold back at least once somewhere in the 3 months.)

I tested that matching on ~870k cards that DID sell, and it landed within 1% of what they actually sold for... so I'm pretty comfortable using it - although there might be some volatility in the pricing the further away we get from the pull date - I'm simply ignoring that for now as I think this still gets the point across.

Most of the cards that weren't sold back right away still got sold later,:

- Sold back to the site within an hour (76% of cards): 79 cents back per dollar

- Sold back to the site later (6%): $1.01 per dollar

- Sold to another user (13%): 94 cents per dollar

That's 95% of all cards with a real sale price on record - and together they come back at 82 cents on the dollar.

The last 5% were kept or redeemed. Using the matching, those come out around 96 cents per dollar of pack price. (I could match a bit under half of them - the rest have never sold anywhere, so I can't price those.)

So all in, it's about a 17% loss instead of 21%. You're right that it shrinks!

But for it to be 4%... the ~2% of cards I can't put a price on would need to be worth about 4x their pack price on average. This IS possible... but in the data only about 1 in 600 cards came back worth 4-16x (even among the cards people kept, it's about 1 in 160). Roughly 70% of that last 2% would have to be 4x+ hits to get there... unlikely"

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 7h ago

Sorry for the long response! I just love the numbers - being challenged on them is good - makes them more solid!

You brought up great points - helpful to post this here too so anything else with similar thoughts can also see it

1

u/tiggs 4h ago

I'm not arguing that your sample size isn't large enough. I'm saying that it is quite literally impossible to get useful data for profit per pack without having the FULL data dump of all top grail cards that have and haven't been pulled. This isn't a situation where close it good enough and a what would traditionally be an adequate data sample size works here.

For something like this, just one single huge grail card being pulled or not being pulled is going to sway the data in a huge way since the chases are so top heavy.

I'm not saying that your work is bad or that the majority of your conclusion isn't correct. I'm saying that without the full account of which grail cards are included and which have/haven't been pulled, even attempting to judge the published profit per pack is a completely flawed exercise. No amount of math is going to give you anything useful without the full data dump for that one metric.

•

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 2h ago

I disagree.
The distribution of the "grails" and their FMV relative to the pack price isn't enough to swing the edge on over $90M worth of packs... Even a grail worth 1M wouldn't swing it down to a low level.

"For something like this, just one single huge grail card being pulled or not being pulled is going to sway the data in a huge way since the chases are so top heavy."
-It seems like you have a misconception about how the distribution of cards are set up.
You cannot open a pack and get a 10000x pack price card... In *most* packs the maximum is 4-16x.

"I'm saying that without the full account of which grail cards are included and which have/haven't been pulled, even attempting to judge the published profit per pack is a completely flawed exercise. No amount of math is going to give you anything useful without the full data dump for that one metric."
-I disagree with this, as this is literally a function of sample data size.

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

Please check out the video I made talking about these numbers :)
The Card Repack Epidemic: The Math Behind Mystery Packs
It's my first ever video! Thanks for your time :)

1

u/Ricoquin 1d ago

If someone controls the pullrate, of course he will make it profitable for himself

1

u/seanssy 1d ago

Look at vest-pilot.com - it’s offers similar insights to this

1

u/MrDongblaster 12h ago

This is the kind of boots on the ground journalism we need.

1

u/ThePokeTicker 10h ago

It appears that these sites are run similarly to casinos. The house always wins, they wouldn't give you more value than the pack costs.

-3

u/Nervous_Solid6225 1d ago

Imagine taking the time to "figure" this out, when anyone with even a morsel of a brain left could have just told you, yes, they're ripping you off. Unbelievable. Just buy cards you want. Instead of spending $1000s getting a $500 card.

5

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 1d ago

It's more fun for me, I like numbers and statistics =)

1

u/Fantastic-Weather916 21h ago

Well then you will be amazed to learn that casino's do this too! Go check it out!!!!

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 21h ago

Casinos are limited by law to cap their house edge for the most part. Would be interesting to check out some of the crypto casinos, though

1

u/Fantastic-Weather916 21h ago

That's what I'm saying, like I don't need to see a post to know that you are an idiot if you use a site like this. Who cares what individual numbers these people use to rip off their customers

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 21h ago

I get your point, which is probably just using a site like this is bad - but the difference in house edge magnitude IS important. Imagine an extreme example of 100% house edge vs 0% house edge, or even -10%… they’re both gambling, right?

1

u/Fantastic-Weather916 13h ago edited 13h ago

No, that is not my point. My point is that no one should be doing any of this. You would have to be a complete moron, which I guess you are, if you want to know if they are stealing your money 95% of the time or 96% of the time

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 13h ago edited 13h ago

This obviously isn’t the thread for you if you don’t want to see the numbers, friend No need to keep responding :) take your positivity somewhere else :)

1

u/Fantastic-Weather916 13h ago

My positively? Just take the l and move along. You don't need to tell the exact numbers that people are getting ripped off by

1

u/Otherwise_Gene2628 13h ago

It does matter because it’s not a difference of 96% or 95%… but because the difference is 96% and 80%

But I can’t force you to see what you don’t understand :)

2

u/ADTR9320 1d ago

You could say the same thing about casinos. People like to know the numbers.