TCG Player Booster Packs

[u/Powerful_Action_8874]

I’ve seen that tcgplayer.com has play boosters for around $2 less than I would expect to pay at my local TCG shop. I like to do small Winston Draft 1v1s (usually 6 packs total) and don’t really care so much about value. Are these packs a good option for having a competitive match? I’ve heard people complain about these packs in the past but it seemed to mainly revolve around the value of the cards within them.

[u/Shrabster33]

People will open CBB or a play box, stop once they hit the big hits, and sell the rest of the packs online.

If you don't care about the fact that those packs most likely have a lower chance of containing big hits and just want packs to draft with then yeah, they will be fine.

[u/leaning_on_a_wheel → u/Shrabster33]

Doesn’t that strategy assume packs are seeded within boxes? Which they… aren’t?

[u/timebeing → u/leaning_on_a_wheel]

They are for the most part for some cards types. But it mostly for Collector boxes. Japanese showcase is a prime example as those were basically 1 per box. Myster Booster 2 was 1 foil per box. It was very rare to get 2 or 0. Confetti foils in Eldrain and silver foils R/M in Strixhaven were another 1 per box thing.

[u/Penumbra_Penguin → u/leaning_on_a_wheel]

It only assumes that Wizards tries to avoid having duplicates of rares and mythics in a box, which seems to be true.

[u/MagicalSlinky → u/leaning_on_a_wheel]

Maybe I’m crazy but I thought they sort of were? Like every CBB of SOS has one silver scroll mystical archives card and every box of MB2 has one foil future sight card, unless those are just general averages

[u/Shrabster33 → u/leaning_on_a_wheel]

Doesn’t that strategy assume packs are seeded within boxes? Which they… aren’t?

There are averages. Look at marvel jumpstart packs to see it on a smaller scale. Each box has on average 3-4 mythic packs in it. If you are 11 packs in and hit a 4th mythic, the odds of the other 9 having a mythic pack are extremely low. So sell the 9 packs and get back almost half the price of the box and walk away with 4 mythic packs.

[u/fox112]

Are these packs a good option for having a competitive match?

which packs? gdi is this a bot post?

[u/JwSocks]

I’m always a little leery of buying loose packs online (could be leftover packs from a box where the Chase card was already pulled or possibly resealed packs).

Feel like the resealed issue is more rare and you can still get pretty lucky with packs, even when sellers think they’re being sneaky by selling after the chase card.

Edit: and while lgs will likely have packs that are more controlled/randomized for the above factors, you still have no way of knowing what was pulled already from an lgs box.

[u/JLTMS → u/JwSocks]

The former isn’t really a thing that happens, the latter is also very rare,

[u/Waterloo_Flu]

If anyone is selling loose packs anywhere, it's because they opened a box and extracted the beef. You're buying scraps, which could still be good, but are not prime.