Rip Breakdown: 2023-24 Select Basketball Blasters
The start of a new series where I talk about a rip and rank it in terms of fun and return on investment.
I like ripping wax. It’s fun. Is it the best bang for your buck in terms of return on investment? Oh gosh no. Usually pretty terrible actually. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a good time, just a good time that you should probably keep in check if you appreciate having money in your wallet.
I’ve really enjoyed the “Better than a Box” series at Sports Collector Daily where they compare the price of a box to a few singles you could purchase instead. I also enjoy “Degen Rips” on YouTube because he always ends the video with a quick breakdown of how much he made back on that particular rip.
I thought I’d start writing up my some of my own rips and give them a rank in terms of both return on investment and how much I enjoyed them.
So, to kick things off, here’s a look at my most recent rip: 2023-24 Select Basketball Blasters.
What got ripped?
Basketball’s my favorite sport and the Spurs are my favorite team which means, well, I’m going fairly heavy on all new releases this year.
I bought 12 blaster boxes from Target. All in all it came to $381 with shipping, or around $32 per blaster box.
Each blaster has 6 packs with 4 cards per pack. Select is follows the typical formula of having a ton of different parallels to pull and chase. The Tiger and Zebra Prizms are the big ones here, though the blasters are also your only chance at the Flash Prizms (which I quite like).
Select also has a few different “levels” of cards, with each level getting harder to pull. Retail has an exclusive Mezzanine Level, and you can find those here too.
Fun rating?
I enjoyed the rip overall. Select isn’t my favorite product, necessarily, but there’s a lot of color to be pulled here which makes it pretty fun. Numbered cards are harder to pull, but not too scarce: I pulled two Purple Flash Prizm’s numbered to 175 and one Blue Flash prizm numbered to 99 across the 12 boxes. The fact that you’re also sort of chasing different “levels” of cards adds a bit more excitement as well.
Quite frankly, it’s a 100x better rip than Prizm retail which was pretty brutal. The quality, as I’ll discuss in a bit, was also much better.
What got pulled?
I saw someone post a bunch of Wemby’s they pulled from their blasters.
That wasn’t the case for me. I pulled one base total out of all 12 blasters. That’s it. Obviously I would have liked more, but there was still some good stuff.
The two Purple Flash cards are super nice to look at though Jalen Green and Kawhi (the betrayer) Leonard aren’t gonna hold a ton of value. The Blue Flash also looks sharp, though again, I would have been ok with someone other than RJ Barrett.
I did pull a Brandon Miller Premier Level, Green/White/Purple’s of Cason Wallace and Giannis (that guy does not get anywhere near the level of hobby love that he should), an Orange Flash of Jamie Jaquez Jr, another of Gradey Dick Courtside Level, and a pair of Jaime Jaqueze Jr. Blue Prizm’s—one Concourse Level and one Premier.
In total, across all 12 blasters I pulled:
21 Orange Flash Prizm’s
16 Blue Prizm’s
11 Green/White/Purple Prizm’s
5 Silver Prizm’s
2 Purple Flash Prizm’s /175
1 Blue Flash Prizm /99
I would be interested to see how well that lines up with others as going into the rip, I would have expected Orange Flash to be more rare than the Blue Prizm’s for sure (and if you look at early eBay sales, they’re definitely selling as if they were).
For the non-Concourse levels, I pulled:
23 Premier Level
11 Mezzanine Level
7 Courtside Level
So Mezzanine, surprisingly, seems a bit more common than Courtside and I’ve heard that from other folks too. But the twist of course is that you can pull Courtside in hobby releases, but Mezzanine can only be pulled in retail releases. I’m…not sure if that means one is gonna end up being more rare than the other—I’d expect it will kind of even out. It’ll be fun to watch the Wembanyama PSA pop count for each level as time goes on to see.
I definitely like the Mezzanine level the best—there’s a lot more space dedicated to the player in the photo, and the card definitely stands out more as a result.
Quality?
I was pleasantly surprised by the quality control. When I ripped Prizm this year, centering was all over the place and there were print lines and scratches everywhere.
That wasn’t the case here.
The centering was super consistent—I would say there were less than 5 cards that looked off-center. And while there were a few print lines here and there, they were again few and far between.
Overall, I would expect this set is going to grade very well if these blasters were any indication of the overall quality.
Estimated return?
This one is gonna be close.
I’ve got a few cards I’m going to get graded and after accounting for fees and such, I’d conservatively estimate ~$300 return there. Which leaves me with an $80 loss to make up through selling everything else. I think that’s doable between SportLots and COMC.
So I’m not losing my shirt on this one, but I’m also not coming out ahead. That’s where I land probably 80-90% of the time I rip something.
It’s probably worth noting that since the rip, I did end up grabbing another Wemby Base, a Wemby Blue Prizm, and two Wemby Green/White/Purple Prizm’s for a little less than the cost I paid for the 12 blasters.
I got a really good deal on all of those compared to what they’re currently going for (that “just got released” price bump is in full effect). If all four got graded as 10’s and I were to sell them (I do PC Wemby—Spurs fan after all—so selling all four isn’t a given), I’d expect a conservative ~$350 profit after grading fees (based on how other releases have sold when graded close to release date).
It’s a super solid reminder that from a financial perspective, singles will almost always make more sense.
But again, you probably aren’t ripping because you think it’s the best use of your money—you’re ripping because it’s fun. And on that, I felt like the Select blasters delivered.