When breakers began to receive their 2023 NFL Optic FOTL boxes yesterday, it became apparent fairly quickly that these were not ordinary cases they were coming from.
The number of Downtown cards they were pulling far exceeded what was expected. This has led many people to speculate that the boxes are loaded. Is this true? If so, why and what does it mean?
We do our best to unpack these questions in our 2023 NFL Optic FOTL boxes scandal coverage.
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As it often does, it started with the folks at Backyard Breaks. They opened a case, and observers noted excessive Downtown cards. One user on Blowout Forums noted, “I’m seeing a FOTL case opened that has 20 Downtowns in it!”
It soon emerged that some cases were loaded with more than 20 Downtown Inserts. The Collectibles Guru reported that he saw a break with: “TWENTY-FIVE Downtown Case Hits in a SINGLE CASE. This included a Stroud rookie, 4 Black Pandoras /25, 2 Golds /10, and even a Zay Flowers 1/1 rookie.”
But this was not just a case of Backyard Breaks being involved in some sweetheart deal with Panini. Soon, hobby enthusiasts and sleuths reported more disturbing breaks with massive amounts of Downtown cards. The breakers involved include:
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Here are the numbers for some of these cases:
We can only speculate as to why Panini would load these FOTL boxes. But on the other hand, the motives for that seem pretty straightforward.
The company will lose its football card license and the basketball one to Topps. That means they do not have much motivation to keep up the reputations of brands like Optic in the long term. Instead, there is a pretty good incentive for selling as many boxes as possible in a short amount of time. In other words, they prefer short-term gains over long-term ones.
One Blowout Forums user speculated, “Yeah – at least three breakers had cases with 20+ today, it looked like. And they weren’t all base DTs; plenty of gold, black pandora, etc. Either a huge pack out screw up, or by design in a few cases because they knew it would go viral and people would scoop up the product (even though hobby will look nothing like FOTL).”
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I tend to agree. Do not expect your hobby, and undoubtedly retail, boxes to look like this. There will almost certainly be fewer Downtown cards in there. These items are most likely similar to the normal distribution of these items, which are traditionally considered case hits.
But it is worth pointing out that if these numbers bear out on the general release, they will lower the value of Downtown cards in this product. Our hobby is now very much on top of population counts, and if these cards explode, it will be noted, and the prices will be allotted accordingly.
But we do not have any hard evidence on this matter. There is always the chance that this is a collation issue and that future boxes will compensate for it by having fewer Downtowns.
One Blowout Forums user certainly thinks that is the case: “Panini has had all sorts of issues with printing and collation since Fanatics bought their printers. Collation is by far the likelier explanation. There just aren’t going to be Downtowns in tons of hobby cases. I hope my hobby box as a pre-order still has a chance if it is in an earlier printed case. Good luck getting one of these out of any later printed case.”
However, the number of cases hits some of them, and its convenience speaks against that. Still, this product was significantly delayed. It is not typical for such a central product of the 2023 season to be released around the beginning of the pre-season for the 2024 season.
Perhaps they were having trouble with this and tried to fix it? But if they did, it was a miserable failure. The number of Downtown cards here is ridiculous, hurting the brand and the insert.
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Downtown cards are some of the hobby’s most beloved and coveted inserts. Many rank them only behind Kaboom! as the most desirable inserts in the business. But they are generally billed as case hits.
That means you should not expect one case to hold more than a single card from that series in an entire case of a product. Panini does not release odds for its products, which makes this method somewhat unscientific.
That is why the appearance of multiple Downtown cards in 2023 NFL Optic FOTL cases is surprising and disturbing.
Here is the full checklist of Downtown cards in this release:
Parallels:
At this point, it is hard to tell what other formats will look like without knowing. We can say with almost complete certainty that these FOTL boxes will begin to explode in value.
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Indeed, if you can get your hands on these for an average price, do so before they go up. People will likely be willing to pay quite a bit for them. Meanwhile, you might find 20-25 Downtown boxes if you feel like ripping. So go for it.
However, that seems very unlikely. There are reports that cases are currently going for between $18,000 and $20,000.
The downside is that if there are a massive number of Downtown cards in this release, it waters down the value of each one. In addition, if the case hit is not worth much money, that challenges the entire release’s value.
Optic is not mainly well known for its autos or anything like that. Its fantastic lineup of inserts is the main attraction, which could remove the value from the case hit and, thus, from entire cases of the product.
It could have the same effect even if this is a collation problem. After all, if there is a regular number of Downtown cards in this release, each 25-hit FOTL theoretically removes one from 24 other cases.
Either way, the disparity in the hits will affect the overall value of 2023 NFL Optic wax. However, if it’s a collation problem only (which I have to say, I doubt), it should not influence the value of singles.
There have long been suspicions that the top breakers are getting better boxes than the rest of us. In January, there was a lot of talk about Backyard Breaks regularly receiving boxes with far more hits than the odds suggest.
Eric Whiteback, the self-proclaimed “collectibles guru,” posted a fascinating thread on Twitter on October 14th. It immediately made a lot of waves.
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His incredible thread broke down the chances that Backyard Breaks would hit all the big cards they pulled in their breaks.
We then: “We don’t know exactly how many boxes they opened because the breakers are not releasing their numbers. But the math is pretty simple. You would need Backyard to spend $40,138,800 on the products to have a 0.5% chance of getting these cards.
Don’t get me wrong; Backyard Breaks are a big player. They rip a ton of boxes. However, according to Eric, an inside source confirmed that the breakers rip 12 boxes of NT daily.
By quick math, that means they opened about 1,000 boxes. If these figures are a good ballpark, their odds of hitting the cards are 1:117,605. So, for less than 5,000, they would need to hit 0.5%. And man, even those odds sound pretty far-fetched.
Honestly, it seems impossible that anyone breaker would hit all these cards.”
The same players are involved in the 2023 NFL Optic FOTL scandal as were in the previous one. Backyard Breaks and Panini are once again front and center.
But this time, it does not seem that hot boxes were given to one specific breaker. Instead, the entire FOTL product appears to have been wholly juiced up. Every breaker who bought these boxes seemed to pull a ridiculous amount of Downtown cards.
If you get one of these on eBay (for an increasingly absurd price), you will also likely receive them.
But the motivation is the same. Many people watch and participate in breaks, which are often their first introduction to a new product.
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When breaks started to become a thing, they were a democratizing force in the hobby. It allowed collectors to buy products they could never afford and provided a lot of fun, often for a low price.
Since then, things have changed. The nexus of the connection between breakers and card companies has become one of the most troublesome in the hobby. Breakers are now the showcase for new products and perhaps the primary clients for the most expensive boxes.
That means companies like Panini have a motive to prefer breakers to regular clients. We saw a similar issue with Topps Chrome, where the company gave far greater odds for their “Breakers Delight” format than the hobby boxes meant for regular collectors.
Once again, it is a conspiracy of big money in the hobby, taking the interests of financial gain at the expense of regular collectors. All this happens at the expense of the integrity of the hobby.
So these companies may find they are pricing regular collectors out of buying new boxes. But only if and when people stop buying into exploitative breaks will this problem be resolved.
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