There are so many different angles when it comes to collecting cards - from finding your favorite team and players in packs you buy at the local store to the other end of the spectrum where you are buying, selling, and flipping cards with a pure business mindset. As the pendulum swings between both of those endpoints, there are various elements of luck, or even gambling, involved. And the biggest gamble out there today, and one rapidly growing in popularity, is what we call a Box War.
What’s a Box War?
Box Wars can be run a few different ways, but it usually is done with a hot product such as Topps Chrome Sapphire or Bowman Sapphire. There are two people going head to head and they each pay the price of one box. The breaker assigns each box to one of the battlers and opens both boxes. For boxes with guaranteed autographs the value of the autographed card from each box is compared against each other using the most recent sold listings from eBay. Whichever box contains the more valuable autographed card wins the war and gets all the cards from both boxes in the war (and sometimes a bonus box) while the loser leaves empty handed.
There are many other ways to determine a winner with one of the main alternatives going with the lowest serial numbered card as the deciding factor. This can be either the left serial number or the right serial number with the opposite serial number being the tie breaker. In the left serial number example, one person’s best card has a 2/99 and the other person’s best has a 15/20, the person with the 2 out of 99 numbered card wins the war.
Rising Popularity
Box Wars, and the very similar pack war, have been around for quite a while, but they only occupied a small part of the consciousness of the card breaking world. However, over the last year or so, Phil Hughes and Houdini from Cheap Fun Breaks have taken it to another level. Using higher-end, desirable products, good YouTube marketing, and Phil’s growing celebrity in the baseball card collecting world, Box Wars are popping up everywhere.
Screenshot from Hughes’ YouTube channel, Phil’s Pulls
Houdini regularly gets 1,500 - 2,000 views on his Box Wars videos, which is up there with his more popular videos he regularly puts out. Phil, on his Phil’s Pulls YouTube channel, sees his Box Wars videos typically fall in the upper tier of his view counts with 20,000-30,000 views per video. Both of these guys are dropping videos almost daily, and while Houdini has been doing this for 10 years or more, Phil has only been in the Youtube Card game for 10 months or so. Over the last two to three months, Phil has begun doing Box Wars on his channel with great success and on average puts out one or more Box Wars video per week.
“Typically a winner in the gambling world makes a profit, but sometimes, in the world of Box Wars, even the winners are losers.”
High-End Products
Houdini and Phil Hughes have focused their Box Wars around recent, popular products that are very costly to acquire. Topps Chrome Sapphire, Bowman Draft Sapphire, Bowman Baseball, Topps Finest Flashback, and Bowman Sapphire have all been the main drivers of these box wars. The most recent popular products for Box Wars have been Bowman Sapphire and Topps Finest Flashback. The next big product to come will likely be along the lines of Topps Chrome Sapphire, but you never know as a product like Topps Finest Flashback sort of came out of left field a few weeks ago and is now regularly part of Box Wars.
Two Men Enter
With these high demand products come high price tags and big time gamble. Let's take a look at one of the most popular Box War products currently, 2020 Bowman Sapphire. Sealed boxes are running close to $600 as of the time of this article. The most basic Box War in this example will have each participant in the war for $600 leading to $1,200 in sealed product.
One Man Leaves?
The loser of the Box War walks away from it empty-handed and with a much lighter wallet. The winner of the war walks away with all the cards. On one hand, the winner could be walking away from the Box War with thousands to perhaps even tens of thousands of dollars in card values in the best case scenarios.
On the other hand, the “winner” could be walking away with a just a small percentage of the value of the unsealed boxes. In the current Bowman Sapphire example, the value of the unsealed boxes is $1,200, and in worst case scenarios the opened cards could be worth $100 or less. Typically a winner in the gambling world makes a profit, but sometimes, in the world of Box Wars, even the winners are losers. The gamble is real.
Box Wars: The Players Tournament
Phil has been getting former teammate and current Padres pitcher Matt Strahm back into the hobby over the past few months to the point where he is participating in Box Wars as well. Continuing that trend, Phil looks to be taking it to the next level with a Box War tournament he has been teasing over the past few weeks. The Players Tournament is a March Madness bracket setup with six former MLB players (Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia, Dallas Braden, Trevor Plouffe, Dan Haren, and Phil Hughes) on one side of the bracket and six active MLB players (Justin Turner, Matt Strahm, Josh Donaldson, Eric Hosmer, Jake Odorizzi, and Mike Trout) on the other side. To say I am very, very excited for this would be an understatement.
I highly recommend going to YouTube and checking out both Houdini (Cheap Fun Breaks) and Phil Hughes (Phil’s Pulls) to see a Box War in action. Definitely go check out the The Players Tournament videos when they come out. And if you have some of that Kenny Rogers gamble in you, go out and get yourself into a Box War.