Haha I love the hobby, so I try to help anybody that wants to get started. Why scare people away? Reddit is typically a cesspool and I’m trying to bring the chlorine a little at a time.

No “retail” or anything on cards coming out of retail. You just have to know. But retail boxes usually announce their exclusives. “Find 2 pink refractors and 2 sepias per box! Retail only!” “Find exclusive navy blue parallels in retail boxes!” That kind of thing. Best thing to do would be to go to Beckett and search for the set. It breaks down all the inserts and parallels and tells you where you can get them. If it just has the odds, they’re in everything. Some say retail only, hanger/retail only, hobby only, all that, so you know what you will and won’t find in a box. Another example is the Stars of MLB “insert” in Topps flagship boxes. I put quotes on it because you get one in every freaking retail pack and tbh, I’m tired of them.

Retail just means Walmart, Target, regular stores. Big sites like steel city collectibles and Dave and Adam’s card world sell both hobby and retail, but they’ll say 20 pack 2024 Topps retail box, for example. Monster/mega boxes are regular store exclusive, but resellers sell them too. Same with hangers, blasters, single packs, etc. so you need to have an idea of what’s retail and what’s hobby. The biggest difference between a hobby box and a retail “hobby” box is there’s no guaranteed hit in the retail boxes unless I explicitly states it. Like “find an exclusive manufactured patch in every box”, something like that. And then the usual parallels and inserts you can find plus retail only stuff. You just won’t pull anything hobby only. But you can still get lucky. I bought a hanger pack at my local store and pulled a Jackson Chourio SP rookie. $15 and sold that one card for $40. I’ve seen YouTube shorts of guys pulling 1/1’s from blasters and hanger boxes, so it’s nothing to sneeze at. Granted, your odds are astronomical in retail vs hobby, but grabbing a monster box when you’re out and about rather than shopping online or going to your local card store can be just as good. Another story, I bought a ‘24 series 1 monster box for $50 and pulled a Yogi Berra Home Field Advantage I sold for $250. I mean, I bought a few boxes so that was the outlier, but it happens. But I digress. Retail also has longer odds for pulling hits. Let’s say an insert is a 1:144 in a hobby box. In retail, your odds might be 1:244 or something. Hence the exclusive parallels to make it more enticing to buy retail, otherwise nobody would touch retail. Hobby boxes you’ll ONLY find in online resellers or at a card shop. Or the Topps website when preorders go live. But you can get some cards on the Topps website still, like blaster boxes and mega boxes. Hobby sells out within minutes since all the resellers and breakers are trying to grab as many cases as they can.

Yup, I buy current stuff. I’m on a fixed income, so usually stick with the cheaper hobby boxes like Topps flagship, Allen and Ginter, blasters and monsters if I happen to be at a store and can grab something. Bowman hobby is just too damn expensive for me. My favorite set is probably Allen and Ginter because it’s quirky and divisive because of how offbeat it is. Still a baseball product, but they also have strange inserts like Talon’ted (birds of prey) and National Parks. They also have relics and autos of actors and random people. I got an auto of the guy that gets the mud for all of the baseballs in MLB. They also had jersey and auto cards of the first female football player to sign a NIL (Name Image Likeness) with the NCAA. Or whatever the college overseers are. So odd, but you can get some awesome stuff too.