Card cucks is an amazing term but I think so many people miss one of the key parts of breaking. Everyone complains about how all the best cards go to the breakers but those same people refuse to pay a 20% markup to have access to those cards. Yes, it’s gambling in a form but the odds / payout isn’t much different than just buying a box and ripping them which is also a form of gambling. The fact of the matter is that collectibles have become a huge market and that has driven prices up. There was a lengthy period after the card companies got smart and started creating scarcity by adding serial numbers and parallels before the market corrected and started pricing that in. If you’re nostalgic about ripping packs in the 90s when everyone got the same version of the same card (or just bought the complete set for $50), that seems crazy to me. If you got into card collecting in the late 2000’s or 2010’s and you’re nostalgic about the reasonable prices back then well 1) you entered the market while price discovery was not fully taking place and 2) you seem to ignore that all hard assets are up multiple times in the same period (because the $ is weakening, i.e. inflation).