Pack Searching (1) - The act of opening up a pack, looking for specific cards, and then attempting to reseal the pack.

Older wax packs are very susceptible to this because of their simple packaging. A wax-sealed pack can be pried open, the cards searched, cherry-picked, and replaced, possibly with a common taking the place of a superstar. The wrapper can then be refolded and the wax then melted and resealed with a common steam iron. A skilled perpetrator can do this and get away with it without leaving any evidence. Other pack-searching techniques include weighing packs, using calipers to determine thickness, passing them through metal detectors, using fiber-optics to peek into the packs, or peering through the wrapper to see the name on the front and/or back card. Some jerks might just pull open the pack a little bit and take a peek. Usually this behavior is encountered at mass-retailers where no one is watching like K-Mart.

Pack Searching (2) - The act of determining if there are any valuable cards in a pack, without opening the pack up.

With the advent of Game Used cards (which, by their nature, are noticibly thicker than a standard card), it has become easy to find the packs that contain these cards without much effort or difficulty. Simply by holding an unopened pack in their hands, many a collector can tell if it contains a prized game jersey card. To combat this, card manufacturers have begun to include "decoy" cards in some packs. The decoy, usually a plain white piece of cardboard, is the same thickness of a game jersey card.

Pack Searching (3) - The exploitation of a noticable pattern in a wax boxes' collation.

Sometimes the manufacturer screws up. Back in the day, if you looked hard enough you could see who was on the top and bottom of the pack -- and not just with cello packs either! If you opened enough packs, you could begin detect a noticible pattern. For example, if you had a cello pack with Tim Foli on top, you could accurately predict that there would be a Mike Schmidt six cards down.

Sometimes it's the pack location that's a giveaway. For example, in 1992 Donruss baseball the packs containing the Diamond Kings inserts were all seeded on the same "level." A '92 Donruss wax box -- or, more accurately, foil box -- contained four "decks" of nine packs. If your box contained a Diamond King on the fifth pack of the first deck, you could be sure that the fifth pack in the other three decks also contained a Diamond King.

Other examples include 1999 Topps Chrome football, which supposedly had all the expensive, short-printed rookies on the same level. (At an MSRP of $6 per pack, you had best find a box that had been freshly opened or well-shuffled by the dealer!) In 1992, Upper Deck football included a special pack in each box that contained cards from a separate set called The Quarterback Club. This pack looked almost identical to the regular packs, but the fin seal on the back of the foil pack was distinctly different from the rest. Once you knew what to look for, it was easy pickings.