As I’m sure you’re aware by now, Walgreens sells sports cards. It’s something they’ve been doing for a few years, and over the last 18 months it’s become a place to potentially find hit product.
Sometimes they have rack packs, cellos and hangers, other times it’s mega boxes and blasters. But the constant has always been some sort of repack product that offers a sealed pack and a stack of various cards often not worth much.
Well, the chase for such repacks often gets rekindled when someone shares on social media some amazing card they pulled. Sometimes it’s unbelievable and leads to a slew of memes or silly posts, but all it takes is one such post to spark the next mad dash to the retailer.
A year ago it was someone finding a 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout rookie in a $5.99 repack; and just a few months ago it was folks finding good sealed packs in their baseball “Mystery Boxes.” And in recent weeks attention had turned to football repacks as modern packs of Football had made their way into football repack boxes.
Not all of these repacks are a winner. You pay $5.99 and take a chance. Sometimes you hit the Select pack, and other times you end up with a junk wax era turd product that probably cost about a quarter per pack. But, that chase is what piques the curiosity and causes us to spend.
I have a theory about the repacks. I think majority of them such value wise but they can be fun. But my theory is that the ones containing good packs are released in bunches that are distributed together. So, if you open one repack and see it has a Select pack, then you should buy the rest. However? If your repack doesn’t then you should leave them alone.
I have no proof, but my thought is this: If you’ve got a room of folks making the repacks, one or two people will be packing out the good products while everyone else is packing out more common stuff. And they’re not mixing up the batches when they send them out. So they stay clumped together until it gets to a region and then it’s broken down for various stores in that area. This would explain why folks in the sticks of Wyoming keeps running into Select while people in a populated area of Georgia may be pulling some 1991 Notre Dame college packs.
Anyway, this latest craze led me into two Walgreens lastnight in the way home from work. It was a low risk, high reward situation for a guy with a card habit. The first store had nothing worth buying; the second store had three baseball “Mystery Boxes” sitting on a peg hook inside a secured case.

My son and I opened a dozen of these around Christmas time and mostly saw nonsense. We did have one or two repacks that contained a 2018 Topps Series Two pack, the chase there of course being Ohtani rookies and the Super Short Print “Bat Down” Ronald Acuna Jr. Most of them contained multiple packs of 2019 Topps Series One and one retail Heritage pack. My son did pull a base Ohtani rookie from his sole Series Two pack about two months ago, but for the most part our experience was akin to scratching an itch with a Kleenex.
So when I saw this batch of three lastnight in a locked case I almost walked away. I didn’t really feel like finding an employee to open the case and then wait in line. In the end I decided to take a shot and bought the things.
As the headline here suggests: The boxes had good product. Each contained two 10-card 2019 Series One packs — these are from a blaster and contain only base cards — and then had two other packs. The highlight was two repack boxes had 2019 Topps Series Two (looking for Fernando Tatis Jr, Pete Alonso and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. No Number SP, and the other has a single pack of 2018 Topps Series Two. The mere presence of the lacks already made these a win since individually some of these cost more than the entire stack of repacks.

The very first 2019 Topps Series Two pack was a banger. About halfway through the pack I unearthed a Tatis Jr. rookie, and just a few cards later in the same pack was the Alonso. The other Series Two packs were uneventful.

If you’ve got access, the means and desire to rip these repacks it could be worth your effort, but it’s also important to know many of them will not contain anything of much value and you may end up hating yourself for the purchase.
That said, if you hit a streak like mine — or like folks are with the football ones — it could also be worth the effort to possibly chase down more. Just keep your expectations reasonable and try to enjoy the journey.
Just because a card is hot doesn’t mean it is time to sell
Posted in Commentary with tags baseball, baseball cards, Juan Soto, Stadium Club, Stadium Club Chrome on February 4, 2022 by Cardboard IconsThe other day I was at one of the local card shops and they happened to still have two 2020 Topps Stadium Club Chrome blasters for sale. I’m still working on the set and had been eyeing the overpriced retail boxes for a year. But on this day I decided the blasters were coming home with me partly because the secondary market for these blasters has gotten worse in recent weeks as folks chase the Juan Soto “shuffle” card.
I mean, who can blame them. It’s a cool ass card showing Soto mid shuffle during a World Series game. The base card has been popular among collectors for more than a year, but over the last few weeks demand for the card has intensified. Sales prices for base cards have doubled and parallels of the card have been much much more.
I asked the employee to grab the blasters for me, and in the exchange he quipped: “Chasing the Soto, eh?
I told him that I already had one in my set, and then told him that my son actually had found an XFractor version of the Soto in a box of cheap singles (3 for $5 specifically) at a card show this summer. The employee was taken aback; his eyes lit up. He inquired what they’d been going for, and when I told him there had been sales recently between $300 and $500, he replied “I’d move that as soon as possible.”
The employee was not wrong per se. The market has seemingly peaked and is currently falling back to a more stabile place. However, my decades of hobby experience have left me in a place where I’m realizing something that others had learned long ago: If a card is in high demand and you’ve got a chance to make some money or turn that card into something else you like then you do what makes sense for you. But if the card makes you stop what you’re doing and enjoy it for more than just the dollar signs attached to it, then maybe it’s something that was meant to stay with you, regardless of how much interest has increased.
In the case of this Soto XFractor that sits in my son’s collection, I remember the exact spot we were standing when he located it, turned to me and said “Oooh!” His reaction wasn’t because it was worth a lot, it was because the card is super cool and is from a product that we often discuss. In other words, he bought it because he enjoyed it, not because it was a means to an end.
This brief interaction with the store employee sat with me for several hours because it made me think about how many cards we as hobbyists have sold because the market was hot, only to later regret for one reason or another. I’ve actually got another related post coming sometime in the next week or two on this very topic, which I think you may also enjoy.
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