Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Worst Wax Box Break Ever: Japanese Humidity Edition


The above image I think nicely illustrates the reason why sports card makers in Japan never distributed cards in wax packs with gum.

My recently revived interest in opening junk wax when I can find it led me to another purchase on Yahoo Auctions, a full box of 1991-1992 O-Pee-Chee Hockey.

I'm mainly a baseball card guy, but as a Canadian hockey is my number 2 and seeing this selling cheaply (1,000 Yen, about 10$) I couldn't resist.

When it finally arrived in the mail I was super eager to open it up and look for Gretzkys and Roys and Yzermans.  But the second I opened the box up I realized the seller had failed to disclose a significant flaw.

Oh dear.  Every single one of the 36 packs in it looked like this:


For those who have never been to Japan, let me explain a little bit about the climate here. Its humid.  like REALLY humid.  The summers here are brutally hot and the air is so thick with moisture you could cut it with a knife.  My home country has no equivalent. 

Coming from a non-humid country living in a hyper-humid one means that I've had to get used to a lot of things that I'm not used to - mold growing on everything, having to be way more careful about how you deal with food, etc.  

But until receiving these cards it had never occurred to me that yeah, that same humidity will wreak havoc on a piece of 30 year old gum.  In Canada old OPC gum just gets hard over time so you don't have to worry much about it.  

In Japan it melts.  

So anyway, I started opening packs hoping that the melted gum would only have stained the top card on each pack.  No such luck!

AAARGH!!!  These packs have 7 cards each in them and on average the melted gum had seeped through the top 4-5 cards, leaving only 2-3 undamaged ones per pack.  In some all seven cards were stained!  

I was a bit critical of the experience of opening my 1991 OPC Premier baseball card box a couple weeks ago on the grounds that towards the end I was getting a bit tired of getting more Kirk Dressendorfer doubles. But OPC Premier had the  (at the time) underappreciated benefit of not having been distributed with gum in the packs.  

Now I think I have discovered the absolute  worst junk wax box opening experience out there.  When at the end of opening the box you are left with a massive pile of crap, including most of the cards in the box, lying in a huge gum stained mess on the sofa next to you....

Yeah, this sucked.  Right up there with spending 3.5 million dollars on a case of rare Pokemon cards that turns out to be full of G.I. Joe cards. albeit without the loss of 3.5 million dollars.  All that I could do was throw almost everything right into the garbage, which is....not nice.  

14 comments:

  1. I love gum stained cards... but this is a little extreme.

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    1. Definitely too much of a good thing even for those who are into gum stains!!

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  2. Replies
    1. I did not leave positive feedback for that seller I can tell you.

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  3. I feel bad for the players in those packs. Trying to remove gum from hockey hair is really tough.

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    1. This is especially the case if you've got early 90s hockey hair.

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  4. >The above image I think nicely illustrates the reason why sports card makers in Japan never distributed cards in wax packs with gum.

    They actually did but they were smart enough to have the gum wrapped separate from the cards.

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    1. Oh good call, I had totally forgotten about those Lotte sets!!

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  5. Man, that's just so unpleasant. Sorry you had to go through that.

    Living half the (non-pandemic) time in Singapore, I know exactly what you mean about the humidity. We definitely have those problems with regard to mold and food. Guess I know to avoid any old cards packed with gum there, not that I ever see any baseball cards there. (Basketball cards sometimes.)

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    1. Oh yeah, I've been to Singapore a few times and I know the humidity there is pretty bad too.

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  6. I've seen some similar things since moving to Tennessee. I say similar, but really I just mean things that have been damaged by humidity; I've never seen anything as gross as this before (collecting-wise).

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    1. I was kind of wondering if there were places in the US with high humidity levels where something like this might be more likely to happen, I didn't know Tennessee was like that (interesting!)

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  7. Replies
    1. That, unfortunately, is where most of it ended up!

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