Hot boxes?

Crusader765

Here is something I've been wondering for a while. I once read that for many products, especially Donruss, in which there are a guaranteed 1, 2, or more hot boxes in a sealed case, there is a known method for finding which boxes are hot and contain the most GUs/autos without weighing them. I would assume the factory puts the hot boxes in the same place in the case, but I wouldn't know.

But the point is, if dealers know this, does a hot box never get sold individually on ebay? I know I've never bought one, and I've bought a lot of Donruss.

Caricon

I've only bought one hot box from a dealer before. It was a few years back, when Topps just started the
gold set. It was a jumbo pack box. Every pack contained inserts and 4 gold cards #'ed. I think I was only
supposed to get 4 total gold cards in the box, and got a whole stack. But that is the only hot box I ever got.

Crusader765

Well for instance, I have bought 12 boxes of 2004 Donruss Elite Baseball from ebay, a few from some other sites, over the past year. There are supposed to be 2 hot boxes in a sealed case of 12 boxes. So you would think your chances of getting a hot box individually would be 1 in 6 boxes. Of course, 12 boxes so far, and no hot boxes with double the number of GUs and autos.

halosfan

Well, any thoughts that people selling individual boxes on eBay already opened the "hot box" and are dumping the rest??

Lothar52

anybody ever got a HERITAGE HOT BOX??? with like 4 SP's per pack or something??

loth

yankeeno7

Best I did with Heritage was 2 Blue Ink autos in one pack. Unfortunately neither were HOFers.

Stone193

Hot boxes?

Shana's pretty hot! Ya gotta love the WPT.

billfish

First box of Heritage I ever bought was hot. I didn't realize until I was telling the dealer what my son and I pulled. He made the comment that it was a hot box. The best card was a 19/25 Al Kaline auto/seat relic. To go along with that was a low # Jeter ref plus 14 other refractors. 2 of which were the black variety. Since I had no ref for Heritage I just thought the refractors were commons. Seemed like every pack had one. It's been a couple of months since we opened them and I don't remember the exact cards we got. I need to re-visit those cards. To balance things out the next box we bought was completely average with just a handful of special cards.

The timeless treasure tin we bought was a total disapointment. I would say the total value for the 4 cards wouldn't bring 20$. Well maybe the Yaz world series bat card might but that was it. I wrote Donruss to see if this was typical but they have yet to answer my email. Breath not held. I don't mind buying a premium product and can take the bad hits with the best but to only recover that small of a % is dismaying. I would expect at least 50% of the cost to be reasonable expectation? Of course with low # big pulls somebody has to pull guts. It was fun until we got to the 4th card. You never know. Next time I'll just put my 100.00 chip on black and leave the tin to a true gambler.

iamthegreatcornholio

Hell yeah Mike!

halosfan is correct though. Products that contain case cards and "hot" boxes are frequently opened as a case, and once the "good box" is opened, the remaining boxes are sold. I estimated the value of a Legendary Cuts box with no chance of a case card at about $40 when they frequently sell for $100. Either know who you're buying from or buy the whole dang case.

Brian

ndleo

Unverifiable story next!

I worked at a local card store on weekends and after work to support my hobby. The owner was one of the largest box dealers in the area. This guy bought a ton of every product that came out. One day I was working the store by myself while he was on a gambling trip. I received a phone call from a person claiming to be from Upper Deck offering a case of hockey product that had hot boxes. I didn't know what he was talking about and told him that we already had enough of that product.

The owner returned on Monday and I told him about the call. His eyes got real big and immediately ran into his office. On Friday a hockey case showed up. I asked him if he wanted me to stock the boxes, he said no and he took it home.

Next Monday he instructed me to list several tough Gretzky autos, star jerseys, and rookies that he happened to "find" over the weekend.

You decide.

Crusader765

Son of a....I knew it.

I'm not equipped to start selling a ton of boxes from cases myself using their tricks (even though I would love to seek revenge cause I've obviously been screwed with these donruss products), but I wonder how do these dealers sort out the hot boxes without opening them and either pack searching or opening each pack. Other than being told by the company which is a hot case lol, but I was mainly wondering about products that definitely have hot boxes in each case.

iamthegreatcornholio

I'm not sure if they know which one is the "good box". I think on a lot of products they just keep opening till they hit it. I used to be a big collector of the SP Legendary Cuts set, and I'd frequently see guys selling about 5 boxes and also a case card - it didn't take much to put it together.

ndleo, interesting story - nothing would surprise me. The people at UD probably know who killed Kennedy.

I remember back to that high dollar UD basketball crap and the same guy just happened to pull 2 of the 3 best cards in the production, and he lived in SoCal too - what a small world!

Brian

ndleo

You can look at it another way - Upper Deck was just taking care of a big customer. By the way, the hot case cost twice as much as the normal case. That is why I was unsure what the guy was talking about.

envoy98

SP Game Used football had hot boxes this year. Generally, you got a jersey card in every pack, and usually one auto/box. (6 packs per box)

However, there were several variations on the hot-box. There were boxes that had 2 jerseys / pack (hooray), then there were ones that a rookie in every pack (hooray again). Then there were ones that had gold jerseys #/100 in every pack (another yippee) and then there were the stacked to the hills boxes that had a patch, patch auto, or auto/jsy in every pack. Those were actually worth getting. I found one of those hot boxes only once and it paid me well.

I have seen guys open the donruss Elite Extra Edition hot boxes before. IIRC there was one auto in each of the 12 packs. They were all nobody auto's though(of course most of them start out that way I suppose).

Knuckles

I think a persons best bet is to try and obtain a hotbox from wal-mart or target.. and wherever else like those two. They don't know or care unless there's a collector working their.

UnAmuzd1

<< <i>

Hot boxes?

Shana's pretty hot! Ya gotta love the WPT. >>

I understand she's retired from the WPT to pursue a movie career... Gonna miss her, she's nice to look at...

On-topic, I never hit a hot-box in sports cards. But back when I was playing "Magic," my first wife and I found several hot boxes where all the commons were replaced with rare cards. So each pack was 12 rares and 3 uncommons. We probably hit five boxes like this (buy one pack, and if it was loaded, the rest of the box would be, so we'd buy it all). (And this was during Revised, so we had a ton of dual-lands, for anyone who remembers...)

NickM

I was at my regular local card store (since closed) when the UD rep came around last summer to see how things were selling and to get dealer and customer feedback. He brought with him a few sample boxes of SP Game Used. The product was not hitting the market for 3 or 4 more days. I was one of 4 customers in the store, and he opened a box and gave each of us a pack, explaining that the product was not yet live, and asking that anything not be resold until after it went live. It turned out to be a hot box - every pack had a rookie (#/425), gold rookie (3/50), or auto. The other 3 people's big hits were Mewelde Moore rookie, Keary Colbert gold rookie, and Ahman Green auto. Mine was an Eli Manning rookie.

Nick

Onlypsahockey

I think the UD hot boxes had the UD logo backwards on the plastic wrap. Bear in mind this was 11-12 years ago. I seem to remember pulling the boxes out of the cases and checking them to see which ones were "different". I'm not sure if Donruss did the same thing.

Bob

ndleo

The UD hologram backward trick used to work. I think they caught on. We tried it on a few cases last year and it didn't yield anything special.

Crusader765

I ran into a thread at beckett where a guy insists there is an easy way to find hot boxes in sealed cases, though I'm not sure if he was just talking about Donruss products or not. I suppose for products that are heavy on game used and cut cards you can just weigh them all with a sensitive scale to see which ones differ in weight. Basically pack weighing on another level. Though that wouldn't work so well with hot boxes for products without heavier cards.