I regularly see ads for old unopened packs of baseball cards. They’re supposed to awaken the treasure hunter in us I suppose. But do these packs ever contain very rare and valuable cards? Or do these sellers have a way to determine what cards are in those packages?
Assuming the cards are truly unopened (i.e., that the seller didn’t open them, pull the good ones and seal them back up), you have a roughly equal chance of finding a valuable card as you do a common one.
Remember, particular baseball cards aren’t “rare” (or, rather, they didn’t use to be before they created gimmick cards). Topps made an equal number of cards for all players. However, some players had a greater demand, so they became more valuable.
The one major exception was back in the 50s-70s when cards were put out in series. It was much easier to get the early cards in the series (i.e., lower numbers) and some high number cards were indeed rarer. Stores that sold cards just plain ordered less as the summer wound down. There was a particularly valuable Brooks Robinson card in the mid-sixties for this reason. However, the cardmakers eventually released all the cards all at once, eliminating this edge. If the card set is old enough, and says, say, “sixth series,” all the cards in it are more valuable than any cards of an earlier series.
If it’s a gimmick card pack (e.g., “One in ten packs has a card in gold foil”), you have the same odds of getting the gimmick card as with any other pack.
Schroedinger would say that an unopened package both did and did not contain rare cards, no?
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- Wax-sealed paper packs (especially ones for sale) are almost always opened. A guy I know who ran a card shop said that the sealed part should have bubles in it if it’s unopened; if it’s been steamed open and re-melted shut, it’ll be smooth. Nearly all the ones he’d seen offered for sale and was allowed to closely inspect appeared to have been re-sealed. When he closed his shop, people had gotten better at re-sealing the wax paper, making it more difficult to detect. He only ever dealt in full cellophane-sealed cases of wax-sealed cards for this reason. The cellophane on the case has a colored tear-strip formed into it (like a pack of cigarettes) that’s far more difficult for the ordinary Joe to open and re-seal convincingly.
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- With some cards, the individual packs are themselves in sealed cellophane or plastic, for this reason.
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I’ll echo most of what was said above. I dealt in cards from 1986-1992.
A caveat: We could open a sealed case of wax boxes. Take out a box. Open the first pack. Look at the progression of numbers of cards. Go down 4 packs in the stack, depending on the brand, and you would find it contained the next cards in the number sequence. You could thereby open a few packs, figure out the pattern, go to the pack that contained the super valuable rookie card you wanted, and still have most of the packs unopened. You then took 36 unopened packs and refilled a box. YOu then had a box with 36 truly unopened packs.
That’s how the pros did it. I did it only as an exercise in how to spot fraud. Truly, I never sold anything as unopened if we had picked through it. But I could have picked your eyes out if I had wanted.