Buying Real Takara Tomy Random Boosters For A Chance At Prize Beys
, by Dee Blader, 8 min reading time
How to make sure you're getting real random boosters from Takara Tomy when you're buying Beyblades for a chance to get a prize Beyblade.
First things first, does Beyblade Premier open each new random booster to see what Beyblade is inside?
The simple answer is NO.
In places like Japan, where Beyblades are abundant, it’s easy to walk into a retail location and choose a random booster from large amount of stock. However, things are different for markets like the US where smaller amounts of Takara Tomy Beyblades need to be imported. In this case, it seems like common practice for Beyblade sellers and merchants to open random boosters and sell them as confirmed Beys.
The problem here is that customers are left wondering if they have a real and fair chance at opening a prize Bey. Certainly customers have the right to wonder if a seller is opening all of their random boosters until they get the prize Beys and then selling the remainder of their unopened stock as “random” boosters to customers who think they have a chance at getting a prize Bey.
Customers also need to be aware of scams because not only are there plenty of fake Beyblades being sold, there are also sellers that might open a random booster to check what’s inside, and then resell it as a “random” booster with the chance to get a prize Bey.
Prize beys in random boosters are scarce by default and the chances will always be smaller compared to other items in the set. And if there’s a specific Beyblade you want in a random booster, there’s no way to know if you’ll get it if you buy an unopened random booster.
To be fully transparent, here’s how Takara Tomy and official TT distributors sell new releases:
Beyblades (like trading card games) are sold in bulk cases.
Each case includes 24 beys.
Each case will a certain amount of random booster full sets depending on how many different Beys are in the set.
Generally, they receive full sets until the last set, which will NOT have a prize Bey, and have a random Bey instead.
For example, if the new random booster has 6 beys, each case will only have 3 full sets, and the 4th set will NOT include a prize bey. Instead, they repeat an additional item from the RB in the 4th set.
Based on the number of Beyblades in a set of random boosters, prize beys get even more scarce at larger scales based on the math.
How Do Merchants Know Which Random Booster Has The Prize Beyblade In A Case?
The answer to this question will vary depending on how the merchant decides to handle this.
Beyblade Premier’s answer is simple and transparent. Not everything is randomly distributed. There must be some type of control and sequencing from production factories to distributors. If they pack Beyblades completely randomly it will cause massive inventory discrepancies. For example, one shipment might be all prize Beyblades while another shipment has none. And that wouldn’t be fair.
For single Beyblade releases, they just pack 24 beys in a CASE and call it a day. No big deal. For random boosters, they divide each CASE into groups of 6 beys and pack them together in a poly bag within the case. It looks like this:
99% of the time, in order to identify each Beyblade, you simply follow the order from left to right starting on the top left. So, the one on the top left is #1 and the one at bottom right is #6. For the 4th set, TT simply just repeats the last bey of the set, so you will get two #6s.
That’s exactly how Beyblade Premier can sell confirmed beys without opening the boxes. We buy them in cases and our supplier does not intervene in the process.
Of course, this requires coordination and trust with suppliers because if the cases are opened or reorganized, you can’t trust the order. That’s why we only work with the #1 distributor in Asia.
Not all suppliers/distributors are willing to go the extra mile and send you the random boosters exactly as they receive them from Takara Tomy warehouses. Sometimes they have their own inventory management and shipping arrangements to protect their profits.
Now you understand that sellers and merchants might open boxes because they might not be able to secure their cases from proper distributors. In this case, sellers need to be honest and label their product as NWOP. The term NWOP means New With Opened Box. In other words, “we had to open the box to know which Beyblade was inside”.
Opening a box DOES NOT mean that the Beyblade has been tampered with because the Beyblade parts are individually sealed in plastic. If you ever receive a brand new Beyblade and all the parts are opened, then you should contact the seller right away, return it and get a refund.
But a merchant that sells NWOP random boosters might be culling their stock to sell the prize Beyblades individually at high prices. However, if a seller understands the order of random boosters, they can still pick out the prize beys and sell everything as a random booster. If you order from a merchant that does these things, you will never pull prize beys when buying a single random booster.
How Do You Trust Beyblade Stores With “Random Boosters”?
This simple answer is that most sellers do not disclose how they manage their inventory since it will involve answering questions they might not want to answer.
At Beyblade Premier, we buy as many cases as we can every time there’s a random booster release. Based on our preorders and a specific amount of individual Beys we plan to sell, we set aside a predetermined amount of cases to be sold as sets or as individual Beyblades.
Next, we ask our supplier to open the remaining cases and send us each Beyblade box individually outside of the polybag they use to divide sets inside the case. This way we do not know the ordering or sequencing. We simply remove ourselves from knowing what’s inside, so it stays random, even from us.
As an example, we buy 20 cases. Based on pre-order interest and community chatter, we allocate cases to either the confirmed or random stock bins. Most of the time, we assign 15 cases to our confirmed bins (which has the highest interest – bladers want confirmed items) and 5 to our random bin.
That way, everyone is happy. People who want to buy entire sets can easily purchase the full set. If someone is on a limited budget and wants a specific Beyblade or only wants the prize Beyblade, we make sure they have a choice. Finally, we want to make sure to recreate the experience of buying a random booster. So if a customer has no preference for any Beyblade, or can’t afford the full set or the prize Beyblade (prize Beyblades need to be sold at a higher price because of rarity) they have a real chance at getting the prize Beyblade at only a fraction of the price.
In our warehouse, we physically label confirmed booster with stickers right after we opened the cases and store them in a different bins from the random booster bins, so they do not get mixed up.
We feel that’s the fairest way of doing business while allowing everyone to keep the magic of “random” buying.
Disclaimer: Our process described here is mainly possible with new Takara Tomy releases and that initial fresh inventory from Takara Tomy to distributors. As new releases age and the initial total stock is fully distributed, then cases become harder and harder to find since all of them have already been opened, split, or sold as individual beys already. In this scenario, usually 1-2 months after official release, the only way for merchants to restock is to buy in the open market. At this point, the integrity of selling “random” decreases since most items available have been sold as confirmed. At this point with low stock in the market and/or not being able to find fresh cases from distributors, most stores decide to only offer confirmed beys while maintaining the initial pile of random booster until they run out.
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