Scaling (the act of weighing booster packs to determine whether they contain valuable cards) has been seeing a lot of discussion online recently, and so we here at Yugioh Prices thought we would take a crack at it ourselves to see whether or not it really works.

The driving principle behind scaling is the idea that “valuable” cards (i.e. Super Rare, Secret Rare, Ultra Rare, Ultimate Rare, etc.) weigh more than “non-valuable” (Common and Rare) cards do. So the first thing we needed for our experiment was a scale that was both accurate in its readings, and precise enough in the number of decimal points it measures to in order to successfully determine which booster packs contain valuable cards.

We ended up picking up an American Weigh Scales GEMINI-20 Portable MilliGram Scale on Amazon for $23.64. The reason why we chose this particular scale was because it was designed for measuring small gems and granulated substances, and it is capable of measuring items as light as 0.001 Grams.

We also picked up 1 Booster Box of Primal Origin, and 5 random booster packs of Abyss Rising from our local Super Target to use as our test subjects.

The process we followed for our experiment was pretty straight forward.

We numbered each booster pack individually, and then weighed them two times using our scale.

After weighing each pack we concluded that packs number 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 21, and 23 contained valuable cards, while the remaining booster packs contained worthless commons and rares.

We then opened each pack and noted the cards it contained, making sure to take a picture of each for the record.

We also performed the same steps for the five booster packs of Abyss Rising we had purchased, and concluded that only one of them likely contained any valuable cards.

The results of all of the weight measurements for each pack we opened, along with whether or not they contained any valuable cards can be found in this PDF file. We’d post them directly to our blog, but for one reason or another Tumblr just isn’t the ideal platform for uploading scientific data.

In the interest of sharing our conclusions however, we’ve included screen caps of the weight results for booster packs that contain valuable and non-valuable cards

Conclusions