Welcome to the *CG thread, where we talk all manner of Card Games – Collectible, Trading, Living, and otherwise! Feel free to chat amongst yourselves about the card games you’re playing or anything card game-related that strikes your fancy.

There’s something oh so satisfying about buying a booster pack (or 30) of your favorite collectible card game, taking it home, settling in, and just going to town unwrapping that sweet card stock. It’s like playing the lottery, or bingo, or gachapon, but at the end you actually have something that you can use.

Apart from the game itself, I don’t know if there is anything more core to the CCG experience than opening (or colloquially, “cracking” a booster pack). There are as many rituals behind opening packs as there are players.

That said, there is a saying among more experienced players: “Never crack packs.” Statistically, the value of the cards that you open isn’t expected to be higher than the cost of the pack. Big cardsellers get cards by the case and open them to sell singles. At that scale, they can guarantee certain numbers of every card. By predicting the demand, prices get set to make profits based on the entire supply, with the high cost of certain cards being offset by lower prices on others. While you might come out ahead in the short-run, scale will beat you in the long-run every time.

So what’s the point of packs? You. Play. Limited.

Limited formats are formats that use packs to provide the cards that you play with. The logic is: if you play with the cards as you open them, you add value to the action of cracking packs at essentially no cost.

There are a bunch of different types: Sealed Deck is among the simplest, where you get a bunch of booster packs and build a deck out of them. There are also Sealed Deck Leagues where you play a series of games over an extended period and add booster packs to your card pool as you go. There are even mini-formats for when you don’t have much time or only have a few players. And my personal favorite – Draft. In Draft, you sit around a table and, in turn, pick-and-pass cards out of booster packs to incrementally build a card pool that you build decks out of.

This week’s prompt: Do you buy booster packs? Do you play limited formats? Ever bought an entire booster box? Or share any other interesting pack-cracking anecdotes.

Or, as always, feel free to talk about anything going on with you in the world of *CGs.