Welcome to my first try at my “Pack vs. Pack” idea. Hopefully this will turn out to be a good way to judge one pack against another regardless of the year or manufacturer or set the cards are from. Going into this one, I only had set up the scoring system. I hadn’t tried it out at all. So you’re really seeing this as I am trying it. I’m sure I’ll figure things out along the way.
I’ll tell you in advance I fudged things a little bit along the way. But hey, it’s my idea and I can do what I want with it. It was for a reason that’s both good and bad and I’ll explain along the way.
Both of these packs came from Target and were just from one of the hanging boxes. So there’s nothing special about them that I knew going in.
Let’s get a-rippin’!
Pack One
The first three in the first pack were not a great start. These packs held a lot of doubles of what I already had in general so that wasn’t too exciting either. The one exciting thing her is that I think Blake Snell signs TTM so I think that is a bonus if that turns out to be a double.
To score these I had to start with the Rookie classification and that got this card a point. I also gave a point to Dexter Fowler as a “Star.” I don’t really agree with that, but I’ll explain why I did that in the scoring later. Basically I was going on name recognition there.
The next three packs were a big difference from the first three. The Yo Yo card (love that pose BTW) scored for being my favorite team, but I also scored it as an All-Star. That’s debatable and maybe I am biased, but to me he is All-Star level. The Devers card is an insert so that gives it a point. I didn’t know if I could consider it a Rookie or not. So I decided to consider it a Future Star. Both are one point in my grading scale but I gave it the point for Future Star reasons.
The last three finish up strong as well. The Judge card is pretty obvious. He classifies as an All-Star. Just to clarify there, it’s not the type of card I am looking for with that terminology but rather the type of player. I also considered Starlin Castro as a Star because of some name recognition. Originally I gave this pack one point for a Star and I was splitting between Castro and Fowler.
Pack Two
Pack two started with two out of three cards that I was on the fence about. Cabrera is an obvious All-Star. The other two I was on the fence about. Cabrera could have been a start once, but then there’s the PED stuff. I’m not giving any credit there. Margot could be there one day, but not yet.
The middle three in this pack were some the source for some good points. I gave Star points to Addison Russel and then Favorite Team points to Jose Reyes. Jose could have been considered a Star, or even an All-Star in the past, but these days he is nowhere near that. The name recognition isn’t enough for me on that anymore.
Seung-Hwan Oh really saves this pack. That’s one of the 401-500 level Short Prints in the set. That’s worth 3 points on my scale.
Pack 2 then closed out with Rookie points for the Braves and Star points for Josh Harrison. I think I could have argued Josh as an All-Star but ultimately left it with my first instinct as a Star.
The Final Scores
Here’s where I did a little fudging. After judging both packs on their own, they came out tied with 9 points. Ugh, as the saying goes, “a tie is like kissing your sister.” So I had to do something about that. That’s when I decided to give an extra point to the first pack for another Star in the pack. Again, my system, so I can make the rules as I go along. For the first one I didn’t want to end in a tie. That’s the bad way of looking at this.
The good way to look at it is that these are pretty even packs out of box. Here are the final tallies:
Pack 1 – 10 Points:
- Inserts – 1 – 1 Pt
- Favorite Team – 1 – 1 Pt
- Stars – 2 – 2 Pts
- All-Stars – 2 – 4 Pts
- Rookie – 1 – 1 Pt
- Future Star – 1 – 1 Pt
Pack 2 – 9 Points:
- Short Prints – 1 – 3 Pts
- Favorite Team – 1 – 1 Pt
- Stars – 2 – 2 Pts
- All-Stars – 1 – 2 Pts
- Rookie – 1 – 1 Pt
I don’t think that is too bad of a start. Let’s see where the next one takes us.
Check out the Pack vs. Pack Scoring System.