Should You Buy "Hot Packs" of Trading Cards on Ebay?

A "Hot Pack" is a pack of trading cards guaranteed to contain a valuable card, such as a Game Used Jersey card or autograph card. More and more Ebay auctions have started appearing with people selling these Hot Packs, but perhaps you are curious as to how they know there is a guaranteed "hit" in the pack. Or perhaps you want to know whether or not you are actually being scammed.

There are different ways to determine if a pack of cards is a Hot Pack. Pack searchers may go into retail stores that sell cards and go pack by pack searching for the find. Memorabilia cards and Jersey cards in sporting cards for example, are made thicker and therefore give the pack searcher a nice target. They will take a pack of cards and bend it, or flex it as they like to say. If a pack is not as easy to flex as the others there is a chance it has the special thicker card within it. Of course there are some flaws in this method dealing with for example packed in security devices, miniature style cards in some of the brands can throw it off, and of course a pack may just have some bricked together damaged old cards stuck together in the pack thwarting the flex. Therefore, the pack searcher does not always rely on the flex alone. They will also take a thumb and press it against the surface of the card pack. Pushing down they will run their thumb down the middle and sides of the pack, searching for the indentation formed by the memorabilia card. The piece of game used jersey or material on the card is generally embedded into a card leaving a shaped indentation or shallow pit in the front. This method is not fool proof either and some searchers have tried to go more high tech. Drug dealers aren't the only ones using scales these days. Yep, a pack with a special card may weigh differently than the regular pack. Good pack searchers will learn about each product and the cards they are searching for to aid all of these methods.

Kind of makes you think twice about buying just one lone pack from a retail store doesn't it?

Another method of determining hot packs, though too costly for the guy spending his time damaging product down at K-Mart, is weeding them out of a full case of cards. If someone buys a box of cards and knows the guaranteed odds of special cards to be found within, for example, say a brand of baseball cards states you will get three autographed or memorabilia cards within a case, and they open enough packs to find two of them, well there's a third one in there somewhere. They could of course cut to the chase using the flex and thumb methods, etc.

What is the danger in buying these hot packs? Well, for one, such actions can technically damage sales in the hobby overall and per-chance devalue the card you are after. But that's not the worst of your worries if you are thinking value. Many times a jersey card or autograph to be found in a pack of cards is of some player or entity not all that popular. Many times these base jersey/ autograph cards are worth six to eight bucks tops, and that is Beckett book value not reality where the thrifty Ebay bidder is only willing to part with 99 cents. If you are paying over eight bucks for a hot pack on Ebay, then you are wasting your money. You can go to the same K-Mart they may have pilfered the pack from and by a blaster box of packs for nine to ten bucks and at least get more cards along with your eight dollar jersey card. Yes, many old blaster boxes advertise one jersey to be found within. You are overpaying these pack searchers!

If you are dealing with the person who has weeded the packs out of a full box or case, then you are taking the chance that they have already opened other packs (depending on the odds) within the case featuring jerseys and taken the higher value ones. You may be thinking you have a chance at a high dollar autograph, when in reality that card has already been plucked and you're getting a second rate star. Once again: a waste of money.

Even worse is the chance that the pack searcher misread a pack and you buy a non-hot pack from them.

Pack searchers are looked down upon by many as rats gnawing into and ruining the hobby of card collecting. Hopefully for the sake of these folks card companies will keep developing new methods of thwarting the pack searchers. (Two pieces of gum, one in the front and one in the back!) However, I'm sure a good deal of you who read this, even if you might one day publicly cry out about such actions as perpetrated by others, are going to go start flexing and poking at some packs of cards. Admit it. Just understand though as a buyer of hot packs, that all of the gamble has not been taken out of the equation and you are still in many instances going to be overpaying for a guarantee not worth the prize.