Breaking a box is one of the most exciting experiences in card collecting. How can you tell? The number of collectors who  share that experience online in card collecting forums, posting on blogs and even videos on YouTube. The reason is obvious–it is fun to share your pulls with others who are also passionate about cards and if you get screwed you want to rant. For readers, it is fun to read/watch, each break is unique, and there is a chance that someone could really get lucky or pull a really rare card.

While it is entertaining, it is also informational and provides unique insight into what breaking a box of a particular brand is really like. We want information on the number of pulls and how good they are. Which is the best box for autos? What about rookies? While individual reviews are helpful, you need to read several to get an accurate picture of how that product is performing. So when we started building our Box Breaks feature, we knew we needed a tool for members to share their box breaks but we also wanted to organize the data so that it would be a useful informational resource.  

In order to achieve this, we created a uniform method to evaluate the pulls from each box. A simple rating system would be too vague to be really useful. So, in addition to a rating, we determined the most important categories for any box: total pulls, autos, relics, parallels, inserts, and duplicates. When members break a box, they enter the cards they pulled from each category and that information is averaged with all other breaks. That information is available to all members and formatted so that you can easily sort by each attribute. So you can see which box has the most rookies, the most autos or which is the highest rated. 

This system accomplishes a few things simultaneously. The most important is that it is a really easy way for anyone to share and track their box breaks. You don’t need a camera or a blog. It also creates an unbiased, aggregated source of information on boxes from the collecting community. Zistle doesn’t sell boxes and we aren’t affiliated with any particular brand so all reviews will be posted. And most importantly, it is a really useful tool for making decisions about boxes based on a variety of attributes. 

We realize that this will not replace the in-depth commentary of your favorite blogger–and we don’t want it to!  We are trying to develop a tool that will be useful to bloggers as well as readers and of course Zistle members. If you would like to be one of the first people to try it out and give us feedback, be sure to sign up for our private beta launching in January at www.zistle.com. We need you!