It’s a rare sports card collector that doesn’t have at least one story about pack searching. To be honest, up until recently I didn’t even know what it was. Thankfully I read about what it was somewhere over at the cardboard connection and got clued in – couldn’t recall the exact story but it was somewhere in their baseball cards section.

The thing about breaking wax is that everyone stands the same chances of pulling hits or misses from any given pack or box. However pack searchers undermine this fair play. By any one of dozens of different methods, they’re determined that they’re going to find the packs with the big hits and leave the crap for everyone else. They’re gonna get more than they’re money’s worth. So what if you get the shaft in the process?

These winners sometimes have a streak of altruism. They wanna share in their good fortune, in their wondrous finds. These are the golden souls that offer “hot packs” for auction. When I see these packs for auction, I face a serious decision: is the pack searcher the bigger dirtbag, or is the person who buys hot packs the one we should be blaming? Because make no mistake, buying these “hotpacks” just aggravates the problem. The seller might have found the jersey pack, but who really wants to bust the pack for a George Parros jersey or a Dustin Byfuglien autograph? Heck, let someone else buy it and take the risk, and pocket the profit by selling it unopened on eBay. Meanwhile, the buyer creates demand – a market – for searched packs.

Greed and selfishness ride rampant in this hobby. It takes a bit of that to be a collector, and makes for good haggling as long as its in moderation. Those things don’t trouble me, nor do the much trouble anyone else. Pack searchers? That’s a whole different game. That’s such singleminded greed that all rules come secondary to self-gratification.

The hobby can do without it. Pack searchers, hotpack sellers, or hotpack buyers please just leave the hobby. The hobby would be better without you.