Didn't Rittenhouse used to seed unmarked hot boxes in their sets?

They used to be unmarked on the outside but there was a sticker INSIDE the box to indicate an Archive box.

quote:

Originally posted by Raj:
They used to be unmarked on the outside but there was a sticker INSIDE the box to indicate an Archive box.

I'm not certain about this, because God knows I never saw one, but I don't think a hot box was the same as an archive box.

The archive box came later and it contains every seeded card in the set, including all hits.

But the earlier hot box just meant that every pack contained a hit. I don't think it had to have every hit in the product. There were also refractor hot boxes, where all cards were the refractor version.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't remember. Also I don't know if anyone is still making hot boxes, because all I hear about is the archive boxes, and I think that has fallen off too.

DC Epic Battles from CZE will have "Epic Boxes" with 10 sketches (I think that's the number...).

Nobody is doing them as a normal thing though.

Ed

quote:

Originally posted by Triple-Frog:
That video is very interesting on packing the common cards but I could not see where they were inserting any premium cards such as relics or autographs.

What I was really curious to know was if this was done by machines or humans and how duplication of relics/autos/sketches by the same artist within the same box/case was avoided.

I started this thread because I am genuinely interested about the process and how different companies handle the process.

I actually got to visit the Upper Deck packing plant in around 1995 when they were in Carlsbad, California, I think it was. The sheets were cut and then the single cards stacked up and put into hoppers. As the cards went down the line, a card would drop from each chute, except for the ones with the insert cards which would fall only every so often. It was really cool to see the other side of the packs I'd opened so often.

Once each little deck of cards were made, they were wrapped and the sealed packs (foil packs in those days) would then end up at the bottom where people were waiting to pretty much grab 9 packs at a time and fill in the four columns of the 36 pack boxes they used. Most of them were adept at getting 9 every time, but sometimes you'd see them grab an extra pack if they were short or put one back in the stack if they had too many. It was easy to see it wasn't an exact science.

This predates the "hits" in modern cards, but there were plenty of "insert" odds cards already by then. Most Upper Deck sports boxes of that era usually had 4 inserts in each box that were 1 per 9 packs and a tougher insert that was one per box, or maybe one in every other box.

Everything was right there in that Upper Deck warehouse, from the computers (pretty advanced for the time) that they designed the cards on, the massive stacks of sheets that were printed there, the cutter, and the workers below packing the boxes. The customer service for redemptions and replacements and the like was also there, in a office to the side.

There actually were big hits even back then, but they were nowhere near one per box. Autographs might be one in 100 cases back then, but Relics were still another couple of years off. I asked if those kinds of cards had a chute as well, like the others, and was told, no, those cards were hand-packed.

It was pretty cool. The had refreshments and the like and gave out raffle tickets they used to award plenty of prizes to those in attendance. We went with a friend, but it's been so long, I can't even remember how she got the invitation since she didn't work there, but it's a fond memory, for sure.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:

quote:

Originally posted by Raj:
They used to be unmarked on the outside but there was a sticker INSIDE the box to indicate an Archive box.

I'm not certain about this, because God knows I never saw one, but I don't think a hot box was the same as an archive box.

The archive box came later and it contains every seeded card in the set, including all hits.

But the earlier hot box just meant that every pack contained a hit. I don't think it had to have every hit in the product. There were also refractor hot boxes, where all cards were the refractor version.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't remember. Also I don't know if anyone is still making hot boxes, because all I hear about is the archive boxes, and I think that has fallen off too.

I'm certain about an archive box having a sticker hidden inside the box because I did open one (see the James Bond Archives breakdown thread). I'll agree that a hot box is not necessarily the same thing as an archive box, though. In my experience, a hot box has additional hits per box without having ALL the available ones.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:

quote:

Originally posted by STCardGeek:

One of my customers got some boxes (don't remember how many) where every pack had an autograph, instead of just the one box. SOmething clearly went kerflooey with that

Might they have been hot boxes? I have heard rumors of such things, but not unlike the unicorn, I don't know if they ever really existed.

Nope, not a hotbox The assumption at the time was the packing company had *leftovers* and just threw 'em all in at the end, but who knows.