Over the past month, multiple people have come forward to demonstrate how various X-ray technologies can reliably see inside unopened trading card products. The concept of X-raying packs has been rumored for as long as X-rays and trading cards have existed at the same time, yet most believed the idea apocryphal, or at least impractical. Today, you can literally pay someone to do it for you.
This new reality is plenty worrisome for everyone on the trading card food chain, from the manufacturers, all the way down to the final buyers. (That's you.)
But what can trading card companies realistically do to solve this problem?
Potential Solutions
Wayne is a Systems Engineer by trade, meaning he works with X-rays for a living. ("If you have any questions about liver enzymes, let me know," he begins right out of the gate during our chat with him.)
In July, he uploaded a vlog detailing the results of an earnest curiosity to X-ray vintage Pokémon packs, which concluded in shockingly successful results. Many cite his video as the origin of the X-ray panic, while some even confuse him for the company that has since come to market with CT scanning services at cost. (The two have no implicit relation.) But it turns out that Ahron Wayne has plenty of ideas not just for how to effectively scan trading card stuff in order to see what's inside them, but also for how to stop people from doing that.
And there may actually be a few practical ways to stop X-raying on newly created products going forward.
Idea #1: Simply randomize the order of the cards inside the packs
"When you're doing a bunch of scanning quickly for profit, it really helps to know where you're looking," begins Wayne. "That's because the way X-ray technology generally works is, you have to hone into a specific location inside the thing you're looking at." That pinpointing can be tedious, but it's a process that can be streamlined when you're always looking for, say, the seventh piece of paper inside an always-the-same package. "But if I didn't know where to look, I might have to do, maybe, four times as many scans, even within a small area."
Put another way, randomized cards likely wouldn't keep anyone from ultimately figuring out what rare card was inside of a pack, but it would heavily slow down anyone attempting to do this at the scale of scanning endless amounts of newly released cases.
And unlike any other possible solution, this one comes at zero material cost.
Idea #2: Stop using "dense" ink
Why the heck does that matter? Well, scientists were able to use CT scanning to accurately read the Dead Sea Scrolls, largely without risk of destruction. But those Herculaneum scrolls? No such luck; the words weren't able to be read ahead of the slow advancement of new machine-learning technologies.
"X-rays show contrast with things that are denser, or that have a higher atomic element," explains Wayne. Guess what that means in this context? CT scans of Pokémon cards, by and large, are picking up the ink, not the paper.
This is why Pokémon TCG is especially prone to this kind of X-ray imaging, compared to, say, many vintage, plain-paper Magic: The Gathering cards; it's definitely not a universal rule, but most holographic Pokémon cards employ a heavier ink, which is most of what you're able to see on these current scans. And sure, that may be a design choice, but perhaps it's one being reconsidered now.
It's also worth noting that while the technology to scan and read plain paper will one day arrive, it would likely currently take government-grade equipment coupled with new-age technology to figure out if a 1952 pack of Topps baseball cards had a Mickey Mantle inside.
Idea #3: Make cards react to radiation
Thus, in theory, it would be possible to design packaging or even cards in such a way that could show some kind of change if it were to receive a dose of radiation from an X-ray machine. This could be as little as a sliver on the card (think: a pregnancy test line), to as much as a giant 'VOID' pattern.
As much pleasure as one might take from imagining a dollop of hypothetical instant karma, this idea is somewhat incompatible with how the secondhand market actually works, not to mention the world at large. For one, tons of unopened product changes hands multiple times before it ever gets opened, if it ever gets opened at all, leaving its final owner on the hook for the actions of all previous handlers.
And also, well, "radiation exists everywhere, not just inside X-ray machines," Wayne reminds us. But this technique is still definitely possible.
Idea # 4: Put some kind of loose material inside the packaging
However, this becomes a problem when your subject cannot remain perfectly still, which is sometimes the case with young people, or people with neurological or mental disabilities.
Using that same logic in reverse, in order to ruin a potential CT scan, all that would be needed would be some kind of non-fitted piece of tissue paper, string, or otherwise foreign item extremely susceptible to subtle movement. This could theoretically be designed at scale for every box, though what it looks like exactly is still up for interpretation. This concept would come at a very low material cost, as compared to using heavier kinds of substances, like metal.
Idea #5: Create randomised metal meshing somewhere on the packaging
"A randomized pattern ruins the scan much more so than if you just put a solid barrier around the box. Inconsistent covering makes (CT scans) very difficult to decipher, even with enough time," explains Wayne. It's such a good solution, in fact, it's the one for which he personally has had a patent pending.
This solution would likely also work well if designed in the lining of the packs themselves, but it remains to be seen if manufacturers would spring for such a costly measure. "Remember, the manufacturer is only [inherently] concerned with retail boxes. They don't sell unpackaged, individual packs."
What actually will be done?
For vintage products, there isn't much anyone can do, beyond educating themselves on the scanning possibilities for each individual set they're interested in, as well as familiarizing themselves with broad tactics already being created by scammers and scanners every day. "One [scam] I'm already seeing on eBay are vintage boxes that are [already] opened, where the seller says, 'One pack opened for authenticity check' and then is selling the other 35 unopened packs. That just screams 'X-ray scanned'."
As for future products? It's easy to assume that major retailers are probably currently weighing the cost-benefit analysis of whether any X-ray panic is large enough to commit to expensive manufacturing solutions, or if fans will forget the issue in time. It would likely take full commitment to one, or a staggered combination of all of the above ideas if X-ray scanning is going to be combatted seriously at the manufacturing level.
And while he couldn't speak publicly on specifics, in addition to still coming up with even more ideas, Ahron Wayne is already advising one major card manufacturer. "I will say that the people I'm working with [are] not interested in a Band-aid fix; they really want to fix it."
