The old era football cards (and tea cards and petrol stickers or coins) where there were no intentionally rare ones, just randomly stuffing a few into packets, were OK. You traded a few in the playground, just about everyone got the set by end of school year.
The modern ones with carefully created low drop rate "rare" cards are lottery scratch card gambling. No better than a fruit machine, or fixed odds thing in the bookies, and in need of regulation.
Same impulses that have led to addictive purchasing until you get the winner. Same cynical house always wins. Personally I put them in the same "clearly gambling" bucket as game loot boxes.
> The modern ones with carefully created low drop rate "rare" cards are lottery scratch card gambling.
I was going to disagree with you because the odds are printed on packs but now that I've thought about it you're absolutely correct. I used to buy basketball card packs and the recent Beckett magazine and see how much each pack was worth, and only now am I seeing the tendencies that caused in me later in life.
I think stated odds are actually where I get uncomfortable. There were always accidentally rare cards, purely from the luck of how packs were filled, and what was rare in one region was probably the common one in another from random chance in distribution. A lot of the card sets had a way to send off 5p or so for the last couple you missed, to fill the album at the end of the year.
Somewhere that morphed into artificial scarcity, and kids everywhere being set up to buy five sets worth of cards, to maybe get a full set.
The modern ones with carefully created low drop rate "rare" cards are lottery scratch card gambling. No better than a fruit machine, or fixed odds thing in the bookies, and in need of regulation.
Same impulses that have led to addictive purchasing until you get the winner. Same cynical house always wins. Personally I put them in the same "clearly gambling" bucket as game loot boxes.