Odds & Fairness

What can be in every pack, how the draw is made, how you can verify after the fact that we did not put a thumb on it, and the legal analysis of why this is a retail sale of collectibles rather than a wager.

1. Every pack publishes its odds

Each pack page lists every card that can come out of that pack and the probability of each, in full, before purchase, to anyone — signed in or not. Nothing is placed behind an account, a purchase, or a scroll-to-accept.

Those odds are not marketing copy written alongside the pack. They are read from the same table the draw itself reads, which is why a pack cannot advertise one pool and open from another. The published pool is stored permanently under its own cryptographic fingerprint.

We publish odds because a customer buying a randomised outcome is entitled to know its distribution. We regard concealing it as unfair within the meaning of California's Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200) whether or not any statute has yet said so specifically.

2. How a pack is drawn — commit and reveal

Before you pay. The server generates a secret random seed, computes its SHA-256 hash, and shows you that hash together with the fingerprint of the exact pool it will draw from. It is now committed: it cannot alter either the seed or the pool without the hash you already hold ceasing to match.

Then you contribute. Your browser generates its own seed and sends it in a second request — after you already hold the commitment. The ordering is the whole point: because the server fixed its seed before it could learn yours, it cannot search seeds for a cheap outcome.

After the pack opens. The server reveals its seed. Anyone may hash it to confirm it matches the commitment, combine it with your seed, and re-derive the precise cards you received. A mismatch is proof of tampering.

Permanence. Because the pool is stored under its own fingerprint, a later re-pricing or pool revision can never retroactively make an old proof appear invalid.

The randomness is drawn from a cryptographic source, not a time-seeded generator, and the server's seed is never reused between openings.

3. What “Value” means, and what it does not

Value is an estimate of secondary-market price, derived from a dated snapshot of third-party sales data and displayed with the date of that snapshot. Graded cards are priced from observed sales at that grade where such sales exist; where they do not, the figure is derived from adjacent grades and is labelled as derived.

Value is not an appraisal, not a guarantee, not a promise of future price, and not an offer to buy. Buy-back offers are separate, explicit, time-limited, and shown as their own number — see the Terms.

Prices of collectibles move, sometimes sharply and sometimes downward. Nothing on the Service should be read as investment advice or as a representation that any card will hold or gain value.

4. Membership and progression never change the odds

No membership tier, level, season, achievement or Adventure alters what is inside a pack or the probability of drawing it. A paid tier that improved the draw would render the published odds untrue for everyone who is not in it, which is precisely the deception publishing odds is meant to prevent.

Tiers buy allowances, shipping benefits and cosmetic status. They do not buy luck. This is enforced in code and checked automatically before release, not left to policy.

5. Grading, condition and authenticity

Graded cards are described by the grade assigned by the third-party grading company named on the slab, together with its certification number where available. We do not assign grades ourselves and we do not represent that any grader's opinion is correct.

Ungraded cards are described by condition on a stated scale. Condition assessment is a judgement and reasonable assessors differ. Where a card you receive is materially worse than described, the remedy is in the Terms.

We do not knowingly deal in counterfeit or altered cards. A card later shown to be counterfeit will be bought back at the price you effectively paid for it.

6. Battles, community packs, and what a win is worth

Both sides open the same packs, from the same table. A battle draws every seat from the pack odds published on that pack's own page — the same table a solo opening reads. There is no separate battle pool, no per-seat adjustment, and no code path anywhere that can ask whether a seat belongs to a customer or to a bot before it draws. A bot seat is drawn by the identical call with the identical odds.

The commitment covers the whole battle, and it is made before anybody joins. One secret seed is generated when the battle is created; its SHA-256 hash and the fingerprint of every pack in the sequence are published on the battle immediately. Each seat then contributes its own seed when it sits down. Each card is drawn from HMAC-SHA256(server seed, battle id : seat index : that seat's seed : pack position). Because the server's seed was fixed and published before any seat existed, it cannot have been chosen to suit who joined or what they contributed.

Afterwards, the seed is revealed and anyone can re-derive the whole battle — every card, for every seat, in order. Hash the revealed seed and check it against the commitment shown before the battle ran. A mismatch would be proof of tampering. The pack pools are stored under their own fingerprints, so a later re-pricing cannot make an old battle's proof stop verifying.

Winning is close to a coin flip, and we would rather say so. Both sides open the same packs from the same odds, so neither side is favoured and the house has no stake in who wins. Simulated over 2,000 battles against our own bots, the two sides won 772 and 755, with the rest tied. What a battle is decided by is which side's draws happened to land higher — nothing else.

Where the house edge actually is. It is in the pot, not in the outcome. A community pack returns about 83% of its price in card Value, so the pot two seats fight over is worth about 83% of what the two of them paid in. Winning a 1v1 therefore returns about 1.66x your own entry rather than 2x. Your expected return is the same whether you open a pack alone or fight somebody over it — the battle moves Value sideways between players and takes nothing extra.

Ties, and the card everybody keeps. If two sides tie exactly, nothing moves: each player is credited what their own packs were worth. And in every battle and group opening, every paying seat receives one identified card worth 30–50 cents, funded out of the pot before shares are worked out. On a one-seat opening there is nothing to divide, so the cards drawn go straight to your Vault instead and no tokens are paid.

A creator picks the cards and the shape of the odds. Nobody picks a card's chance by hand. No endpoint on this Service accepts a weight, a probability or a price from a pack's creator, so a creator cannot tilt a pack toward or away from any one card. Each card's chance falls as its Value rises — how steeply is the one thing the creator chooses, from ten fixed positions we define, and the pack is priced to return 83% at every one of them. At the middle position, and at the Values the odds were set at, every card in a pack contributes the same expected Value — a card worth ten times as much comes up ten times less often. Values move after a pack is published and its odds do not, so on any given day that proportion is approximate; the table on the pack's own page is exact, and it is the table the draw uses. One consequence worth knowing before it surprises you: because of that rule a pack's expected Value is the harmonic mean of its cards', which is dominated by its cheapest card. Adding one cheap common to a pool of grails makes it a cheap pack.

Graded cards in community packs are limited to grades we stock. Public graded price feeds report a printing's price under a related printing's identity often enough that we will not price a community pack from them unsupervised. A creator may only use a card in a grade that appears in cardhouse's own packs, where the row was chosen by a person and we have a real cost against it.

7. Why this is not gambling, and not a sweepstakes

Under California law a wager requires consideration, chance and a prize contingent on the outcome — that is, the risk of losing what was staked. The following describes why that structure is absent here.

You always receive goods. Every pack delivers real collectible cards of stated Value. There is no outcome in which the customer receives nothing. What varies is which goods, and how much they are worth on a secondary market we do not control — the same variability that attaches to a sealed booster box bought at retail.

Nothing pays out in cash. Tokens are closed-loop value, spendable only here, on our own goods and services. They cannot be withdrawn, transferred, gifted or converted to money, and neither can anything drawn from a pack: selling a card back pays tokens. There are no cash prizes and no cash equivalents.

There is one currency, not two. cardhouse has no second, "promotional" or "sweeps" currency that is redeemable when the first is not, no free-entry alternative method of participation, and no prize draw of any kind. It is a retail sale of randomised collectibles, with the distribution published rather than left to the manufacturer.

Nothing simulates a casino. There are no slot machines, reels, wheels, card tables, dice, house games or wagers, and no presentation of an opening that imitates one.

Applying the statute. California's AB 831, in force since 1 January 2026, prohibits online sweepstakes games that combine (i) a dual-currency system, (ii) simulation of casino-style gambling, and (iii) awards of cash or cash equivalents — and extends liability to platforms and payment processors that support them. cardhouse satisfies none of the three limbs, and the absence of any one of them would be sufficient. Nor is the Service a lottery under Cal. Penal Code § 319, which requires a distribution of property by chance among persons who have paid for a chance at that property, rather than a purchase of property itself.

What this section is. It is a description of how the Service is built and the reasoning that follows from it. It is not legal advice, it is not a warranty, and it does not bind any court or regulator. It is published so that the reasoning can be checked against the product rather than asserted.

8. Check us

Every opening you make retains its commitment, its seeds, its pool fingerprint and its result, and you can re-verify any opening from your history at any time, indefinitely.

If a verification ever fails, tell us at support@cardhouse.live. A broken proof would be the most serious defect this Service could have, and we would treat a report of one accordingly.

cardhouse is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by The Pokémon Company International, Nintendo, Creatures Inc., GAME FREAK inc., or any grading company. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners, and cards are resold under the first-sale doctrine.

Questions about anything on this page: support@cardhouse.live