A torn-open foil card pack on a dark desk, one blank card in a clear slab lit in teal, with a line of cards drifting into a bank-style deposit slot in a steel wall.
MarketsNewsSports

PrizePicks Packs Launch With the $8 Million Flagg Card and an Automatic Buyback Into Pick’em Balance

Aaron Harme

PrizePicks, the daily fantasy app, launched PrizePicks Packs on Wednesday, selling digital packs of basketball, football and Pokémon cards for $1 to $2,500 in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., the company announced. Each pack holds one real card kept in a vault. The headline card is Cooper Flagg’s one-of-one rookie debut patch autograph, which carries his signature and a patch from the jersey he wore in his first NBA game. It sold for $8.04 million at auction in September. PrizePicks also has Dylan Harper’s and Kon Knueppel’s one-of-ones, valued at $2.88 million and $2.34 million, plus a Pikachu Illustrator it puts at about $2.8 million.

PrizePicks bought the cards from a third party after the auction, a spokesman told Sports Collectors Daily, and it lists all three NBA cards at the prices they sold for. Every pack, including the $1 tier, can pull one of them, with better odds as the price rises. A $1 pack normally lands a card worth 30 cents to $20, PrizePicks’ Packs page says.

The product works like opening a pack on screen. You pay, the app reveals your card and a “fair market value,” and you either sell the card back to PrizePicks for 100% of that number or pay to have it shipped. PrizePicks sets that number using outside pricing services such as Card Ladder and ALT, or recent sales, according to the Packs page. Its terms of service add that it can weigh “other factors it determines are relevant,” and that its figure “may not match any particular third-party valuation.”

Sale proceeds go into your PrizePicks balance, which “can be used across all PrizePicks products,” the help center says. That is the same balance that pays for pick’em entries, the app’s main product, where players pick whether athletes go over or under a stat line, and it can also be withdrawn.

Getting the physical card means requesting shipment and paying a fee out of that balance. A buyer who does nothing gets the sale instead: “If you don’t act within 3 days of the moment you open your pack, your card will sell back to PrizePicks at 100% of the FMV.” Underdog’s Rips, which launched in September, ends the same way, with an automatic sale at fair market value after three days, according to Underdog’s help center.

The terms behind the pack

The Packs terms call each purchase “a retail purchase of repacked physical collectible trading cards for a disclosed price.” The buyer agrees it is not “gambling, wagering, a lottery, or a game of chance,” and agrees “not to assert otherwise or to allow anyone else to assert otherwise on your behalf.” The same document bars anyone on a self-exclusion list “related to PrizePicks’ other lines of business,” and the launch release lists deposit limits, exclusion lists and behavioral health services among the protections built into Packs.

The terms also let PrizePicks mark a card “Shipment-Only,” which means no buyback at all. It can do that for a card it “treats as rare, limited, or otherwise special and does not want to recirculate through the Platform,” or for one whose price moves too fast to set, and the buyer learns the status after paying.

Any pull the buyer doesn’t ship comes back to PrizePicks at a value PrizePicks picks, and it sits as balance one tap from a pick’em entry. The rare cards the $1 packs are marketed on are the kind the terms let PrizePicks refuse to buy back. A company selling cardboard at retail rarely needs its customers to promise they’ll never call it gambling, and PrizePicks put that promise in the same contract that sends every unshipped pull back into the PrizePicks balance.

Sources

Discover more from Bitter Fool

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *