General Forum

I opened a blaster box of 2018 Score football; 11 packs, 12 cards per.  As I was sorting I immediately notice a pattern.

Score drives me up the wall with this. I recently bought two boxes of 2016 Score Football and each has 33 rookies in it. 3 Per pack 11 packs. After opening both boxes I had 33 rookies and 33 rookie dups.

Agreed!! Nothing made me madder!! Ive seen the same thing in the past with Score hockey as well.

Sadly, it's not just Score (or Panini). And it also isn't a new trend. I saw the same thing in 1988 Donruss baseball (back then) and also in 2018 Donruss NASCAR (now a Panini product). That also used to be a big trend in Upper Deck cards from the 90's through the 2000's. It didn't matter if it was retail or hobby then or now.

When I was buying the 2018 Donruss NASCAR blasters, I got 3 of them and each was in a different trip to Target in different weeks. The 1st box was good (of course). The second box was mostly different cards but 1-2 per pack were duplicates pulled from the first blaster. The 3rd box was basically ALL duplicates from the first 2 boxes in the same orders. The duplicates almost always came out of a pack in the same order with only the first 1 or two OR last 1 or 2 cards being different. Panini clearly has an order to their pack-out process. Even inserts were duplicated in some packs. But like I said before, that was a problem in many sports and brands going back into the 1980's. I busted a full box of 1990 Bowman baseball cards several months ago and saw the same thing. After half the packs were opened, I could tell in the rest of the packs after the first 3-4 cards if I was going to get more towards set completion or more duplicates. I ended up with 3 copies of some cards and no copies of other cards. So it doesn't seem to matter if the product is new or old, what brand or product, or what sport, you're going to come across packs that are basically lined up in a certain order. The order does get thrown off a little bit better now with so many different insert sets being inserted into each pack, but there is still an order to it. And obviously, the "hits" being almost guaranteed today proves there is an order the the packing process.

@CAD - I open packs the same way. But I don't usually sort them by number until the end. That's when you really see the ORDER of the entire box. But if it's lots of cards in one box, I'll sort several packs together in numerical order. Then I open that same amount of packs in the box and sort them. By then, you can already see the order they are coming out of packs.