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.