This week, Disney Lorcana co-designer and brand manager Ryan 𝐆Miller revealed that, starting with set three next year, . Miller confirmed that all future expansions from set three onward will be protected this way in order to provide another level of security to booster boxes.
Plastic wrap around a cardboard box might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The flaws in the first run of Lorcana booster boxes were a significant cause for concern, and while the wait for a solution is longer than would be ideal,ꦅ it’s great that Ravensburger is addressing this and taking the security of booster boxes seriously, for the sake of colle🎐ctors, players, and retailers.
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The second I got my hands on my first booster box at Gen Con earlier this year, I knew there was a problem. While the pull tab design does ensure you have to destroy the box to open it - a security measure meant to ensure people don’t open boxes, mess with the packs, then glue the box shut again - the fact that the box wasn’t shrink-wrapped, as is standard for otheꦰr TCGs, meant it was easy to reach inside and pull packs out without ever opening the box. .
There’s a few reasons why this is a problem, some obvious and some less so. No one wants to buy 💛a sealed box and find out that it’s missing packs, but stealing packs out of a box i💝sn’t really the problem. You would know immediately if your box was missing packs, which would make this a pretty lousy scheme for any seller. Maybe they would get away with it once or twice, but garnering a reputation for selling boxes with missing packs wouldn’t be good for business. The real concern is that sellers could be repacking boxes.
If someone wanted to take all the packs⛎ out of a box, open the packs, or even weigh them as packs with Enchanted cards are roughly 0.25 gra🃏ms heavier,, then repack the box with all the non-Enchanted packs and sell the box, there’d be no way for the buyer to know they did that. Booster boxes have batch numbers that match the packs inside, but lots of boxes have the same batch number. As long as you put 24 packs with the same batch number back into the sealed box, no one would ever know whether or not the box had been manipulated.
Leaving off the plastic wrap undoubtedly saves the world from millions of feet of plastic waste everywhere, a noble effort on Ravensburger's part and something that ought to be a priority for all manufacturers. The world desperately need a cost-effective alternative to plastic.
There hasn’t been any LGS or online retailer accused of doing this to my knowledge, but the problem is that anyone could do this, and we’d never know. That layer of doubt casts a shadow over every Lorcana booster box, and while it certainly hasn’t hurt sales, the insecurity create🔯s an air of hostility between customers and retailers. If I buy a box from someone and I don’t find an Enchanted card, I’ll always have to wonder if there was supposed to be one in my box that was stolen from me.
It’s hard to understand how the boxes hit store shelves with this glaring flaw, but to their credit, Ravensburger has already addressed it with the second wave of boxes. Both The First Chapter reprints and Rise of the Floodborn🎐 boxes have stickers, called wafer seals, on both sides of the box where you would otherwise be able to reach in and take packs out. While this addresses the main problem, there’s still an issue with the perforation at the top of the box, which is designed to open up for display on a store shelf. It’s very easy for the perforation to come apart in shipping, and I’ve personally received booster boxes in the mail that were fully open on top. The shrinkwrap will fix this problem entirely.
All's well that ends well, but there’s a bit of a weird consequence to the addition of the wafer seals, at least for long-term collectors. While Ravensburger opted not to print first edition cards after the initial D23 Expo set, the seals on second wave and future prints of The First Chapter boxes does have the effect of separating first-run boxes from the reprints. The cards themselves have some differences too, due to errata, but you wouldn’t know that unless you opened the packs. There’s a good chance that those unsealed first-run boxes will be treated like the first product in the market, despite the fact that they’re less secure than the wafer sealed boxes, simply because it’s apparent that they’re cards from the original print run.
This only really affects sealed produc🦂t collectors, and I’m not shedding tears for the people that buy up card games just to shove them in a closet in the hope that they’r✨e worth a lot of money some day. But it’s interesting to see the ripple effects from the initial decision not to plastic wrap the boxes, when it is such a standard part of other TCGs, and has been for decades. It would have been nice not to add so much useless plastic to the world, but in this case, it seems like there’s no way around it.