Every pack site tells you what you could win. None of them tell you what people actually get. We can, because we record it: in the last 24 hours alone we logged 39,477pack openings from the sites' own public feeds, the misses as well as the hits.
So here is the question nobody in this industry answers, answered with numbers rather than adjectives.
What we measure, exactly
For every pull we can see two things: what the pack cost, and what the card that came out is worth. Add both up across every opening in a window and you get one honest figure, which we call paid back. It is card value out divided by pack price in, as a percentage.
A hundred percent means the cards coming out are worth what the packs cost. Below that, openers are losing money in aggregate. Above it, they are not, at least on paper.
The numbers, live
| What was opened | Pulls recorded | Paid back |
|---|---|---|
| Pokemon | 33,209 | 110.5% |
| One Piece | 698 | 100.6% |
| Riftbound | 343 | 100.1% |
| One-piece-card-game | 272 | 100.1% |
| Football | 1,410 | 80.1% |
| Magic | 234 | 78.4% |
| Baseball | 953 | 77.3% |
| Basketball | 1,798 | 74.7% |
Two things about that table matter more than the individual rows. The first is that it moves. Reload this page tomorrow and the figures will be different, because it is generated from the last 24 hours every time rather than typed in when the article was written.
The second is the spread. These categories are not close to each other, and the gap between the best and worst is far larger than most people would guess. What you open matters more than where you open it.
Why a figure over 100% is not free money
This is the part that gets misread, so it is worth being blunt. A category paying back over 100% does not mean opening packs there is profitable. Three reasons.
Card value is not cash. The number we use is the market price of the card, and turning a card into money costs you fees, postage and time, or a haircut if you sell it back to the site. Twenty percent can disappear between the pull and the payout.
The average is not your experience. Payback is dominated by rare large hits. Most openings return well under the average, and a handful return enormously more. You will almost certainly be in the first group. That is what average means when the distribution has a long tail.
And the window is short. A single day can be swung by one huge pull. That is exactly why we show the pull count next to every figure, so you can see how much weight each row can carry.
Why nobody else publishes this
Not because it is secret. The feeds are public. It is because it takes a collector running against every site continuously, a database that can hold hundreds of thousands of rows a day, and a willingness to publish a number that is sometimes unflattering to the sites you link to.
We do link to those sites, and they pay us when someone signs up. That is exactly why this page exists in the form it does. If our numbers only ever flattered our partners, they would be worth nothing to you, and you would work that out quickly.
How to use this
Pick the category, not just the site. The spread between categories in that table is bigger than the spread between most sites within a category. Then check the site-level figures on our board, which are measured the same way over the same feeds.
And treat the whole thing as entertainment spending with a known cost, because that is what it is. The cost is the gap between the pack price and the payback figure, and now you can see it.
Go deeper: every pack ranked by payback, sports against Pokémon, and the site-by-site figures.
Questions people also ask
Are pack opening sites worth it?
On average, no, because every pack is priced above what it returns. The table above shows how large that gap is by category, measured rather than estimated.
What is a good pack opening return rate?
There is no good rate, only a smaller or larger gap. Compare categories and sites on the measured figure rather than on any published odds sheet.
Do pack sites rig their odds?
The provably fair systems most sites use let you verify that a result was locked before you clicked. That proves honest draws, not generous odds, which is the separate question the payback figure answers.
The short version
Pack openings pay back roughly what the table above says, measured from real openings rather than estimated. It is close to break even on paper, below break even once you account for turning cards into cash, and nowhere near break even for any individual person who is not the one hitting the big card.