Topps Launched Burn Event for Golden GPK Cards

Trading card company Topps has launched a burn event for digital Garbage Pail Kids collectible cards, potentially rewarding collectors with golden cards. From December 4th until December 9th collectors can burn cards from the Garbage Pail Kids Series 2 to make them eligible of winning random Series 2 gold cards.

For Topps a burn event is interesting for commercial reasons. Burning cards will make them more rare on the public market place, increasing value. As a company Topps makes a small percentage over each sale on the secondary market. Increased value will obviously mean more money.

The burn event is also interesting for collectors, as they have a chance to acquire a rare golden card. However, it should be noted that the Burn 4 Gold event doesn't provide a guarantee. You might burn fifty cards from the GPK Series 2 and receive nothing.

The Topps Burn 4 Gold event for Garbage Pail Kids has four different tiers. Each of these tiers has different requirements, and requires players to open existing packs or burn base cards. In addition each of the tiers only has a few golden cards available. However, each golden card is unique!

Burn 4 Gold tiers overview

• Tier 1
  • Burn 5 BASE Cards
  • Unique Gold Cards Available: 40
• Tier 2
  • Burn 10 BASE Cards; Open 3 Standard Packs
  • Unique Gold Cards Available: 25
• Tier 3
  • Burn 30 BASE Cards; Open 2 Mega Packs
  • Unique Gold Cards Available: 10
• Tier 4
  • Burn 100 BASE Cards; Open 1 Ultimate Pack
  • Unique Gold Cards Available: 5

When you qualify for a higher tier, you're also automatically entered for a lower tier. All collectors need to do is open packs and burn cards. Their actions are stored on the blockchain, and they will automatically qualify for the event. For example, a collector burns 440 cards, and opens two Ultimate packs will qualify 88 times in Tier 1 and 2 times in Tier 4.

Rarity on the blockchain

For years we've been curating content on Instagram and collecting achievements on Playstation and Xbox. Apparently we are a generation who loves digital collectibles. However, collectibles are only really collectibles when there's a certain rarity. That's where the blockchain comes into place. Through blockchain technology the total supply and ownership of digital assets can be controlled. The technology verifies whether someone has an original version of a digital asset or merely a screenshot.

While physical collectibles could provide a thousand assets, we'd never be able to locate all of them. Rare physical games could become less valuable when suddenly a box of unopened first edition pops-up in an old warehouse. On the blockchain the supply is always clear, and burning mechanisms feed into the concepts of rarity and collectability. Destroying digital assets to (potentially) acquire new ones, is an interesting way for digital collectibles to deal with rarity.

Topps is now introducing this concept to its Garbage Pail Kids digital collectibles. However, it's quite safe to say that gaming will also deal with this. Card games like Gods Unchained and Synergy of Serra are likely to embrace the same concept, as it would create utility for older cards which in turn creates demand for new cards. Last week Tribal Books burned all the remaining assets from its pre-sale to make sure that these first assets are truly scarce.