Just when you thought the Pokémon world couldn’t get any wilder, a new trend has crawled out of the woodwork that makes weighing booster packs look like a harmless party trick. Forget the kitchen scale, folks. The new frontier in hunting for chase cards involves a multi-million dollar piece of equipment you’d normally find in a hospital’s radiology department: a CT scanner.
That’s right. As first reported by outlets like PokeBeach and Kotaku, people are putting Pokémon packs under X-ray vision to peek inside and see if that shimmering Charizard is waiting for them. The age of “blind packs” might just be over, and the community is absolutely losing its mind.
From Mad Science to a Bona Fide Business
So, how did we get here? This isn’t just some Team Rocket scheme cooked up in a secret lab. The trend exploded into public view when a tech-savvy hobbyist, Reddit user u/clayandsilva, showcased how he jury-rigged an old CT scanner to generate images clear enough to spot the goodies inside a sealed pack.
Then, things got professional. A Michigan-based company, Industrial Inspection & Analysis (IIA), whose day job is to find microscopic flaws in aerospace parts, realized their high-tech gear could do something a little more fun. After a case study where they successfully identified cards, they were flooded with interest.
As a representative told PokeBeach, “We had no intention of using our technology to disrupt the Pokémon space… We just wanted to scan some Pokémon cards to demonstrate the accuracy of our equipment.” Now, according to their price guide, for about $75 a pack or $400 for a booster box, they’ll give your sealed product a full-body scan.
For vintage collectors, dropping $75 to verify the contents of a $700 1st Edition Base Set pack might seem like a no-brainer. But for the rest of us, it begs the question: What does this mean for the soul of the hobby?
Track Your TCG Collection
Create your free Card Codex account to monitor card prices, view real-time market trends, and analyse your portfolio’s growth.
Start Tracking Now — It’s FreeIs This Progress or Sacrilege?
The reaction from the TCG community has been swift and deeply divided. It’s an all-out civil war fought in YouTube comments and Reddit threads.
On one side, you have the purists. To them, this is the ultimate buzzkill. As one collector lamented on Reddit, “For the vintage collectors who like loose packs, this is like worst case scenario.” They argue this will create a two-tiered market: expensive, “confirmed hit” packs for the rich, and a sea of guaranteed duds for everyone else. It’s a future where the joy of the hunt is replaced with cold, calculated certainty.
But then there’s the other side: the pragmatists. They see this not as a tool for cheating, but for authentication. The vintage market is a minefield of resealed packs and fakes. From this perspective, CT scanning is a weapon for good.
IIA themselves have leaned into this, positioning their service as a way to “level the playing field.” Speaking to PC Gamer, a company representative stated, “We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The only direction for us is forward, because if we don’t offer this now another company will later.”
What Does This Mean for Your Next Pack?
Let’s be real: your local Target isn’t going to have a CT scanner in the checkout aisle anytime soon. For now, this tech is mostly impacting the high-end vintage market. But technology has a funny way of getting cheaper and more common.
The immediate fallout is a crisis of faith. How can you trust a loose pack from an online seller ever again? Are live-streamers on WhatNot secretly scanning their cases off-camera? The paranoia is palpable. Nick Andrews, co-host of the Sports Card Madness podcast, put it bluntly in an interview with Sports Illustrated: “[IIA] took the stance of Napster in a way, like they’re not committing fraud. What these people do with these CT scan(ned) cards is not their problem.”
The Inevitable Arms Race
This whole situation feels like it’s kicking off a TCG arms race. Will The Pokémon Company have to step in and play defense? We can almost picture the emergency meeting at Pokémon HQ now.
Are we about to see packs with new, scan-proof technology? Maybe a thin layer of lead-like foil in the wrapper (please don’t lick the packs, kids). Or perhaps they’ll start inserting “decoy” holos—cards with a foil layer but featuring a very disappointed-looking Magikarp to throw off the scanners.
When asked by PokeBeach how to defeat a CT scanner, IIA’s metrology manager suggested that manufacturers could “employ certain techniques to reveal a mark” if a pack has been exposed to X-ray radiation.
For now, the Meowth is out of the bag. The ability to see inside sealed packs is here to stay. Whether it becomes a helpful tool for authenticators or the go-to weapon for scammers will be decided by the ethics of the community.
One thing is for certain: the simple act of opening a pack of Pokémon cards just got a whole lot more complicated.
