These packs were so much more fun when there were random incentives and less common books in some of them. The comic community freaked out, and Marvel responded by getting rid of most/all of that. Now those marvel packs are meh. DC still has a few fun things in there from time to time.
Are you sure that is true? I think Marvel is oblivious to what goes in these packs. I thought it was diamond that provides the books to Walmart.
I don’t think marvel holds on to any of the stock. Maybe they authorize Diamond to release the books to Walmart, but beyond that why would Marvel care?
I believe Diamond handed the books off to MJ Holdings who made the packs up and distributed to Walmart. As for incentives, I have not found any Marvel incentives since that windfall of incentives.
The closest Walmart to me is 15mins away. They haven’t carried any Comics, Pokemon Cards, and Baseball cards in a long time due to the way people where speculating and robbing people for the cards.
Oh, I have ZERO evidence of any policy change with these. All I know is for a quarter or two, we had a bunch of incentives and a few store exclusives flowing in. Mass hysteria ensued. And, now those packs have very few to no incentives. Either they coincidentally had incentive overprint stock and quickly used it all up, or someone somewhere said, “stop doing that.”
I’m all about the incentives showing up, so maybe if we’re really loud about how we WANT incentives in there, they will start showing up.
The packs have been around for a while before people got hot on them. My guess is they just happened to get to a point where they had GOOD comics to put in them (warehouse finds after COVID? Extra stock because of slow sales earlier in the pandemic? Diamond giving them “the good stuff” because they were trying to make cash and clear out whatever Marvel they could while they could? Who knows) and when they got bought out, they put as many packs out as they could, and now we’re to the point that PRH+Marvel are printing a lot less copies, and there’s just not an overabundance of dead inventory sitting around.
I can only speak anecdotally from my own previous experience, but Diamond often had more replacements for variants and comics in general than PRH had. I don’t know if they held back a higher %, if Marvel overprinted more for damages/shortages, or what.
Changes that I can spot outside of the lack of cover bar code:
Spider-verse looks like the 2nd print cover but with a different background color.
Ms Marvel Moon Knight looks like a new cover
Shang-Chi is the A cover with a different logo color
Ant-man is the A cover with a different logo color
X-men is the A cover with a different logo color
Star Wars is the A cover with a different logo color
Edit:
There’s also an Amazing Spider-Man 1 facsimile pack that is the exact cover, but with no cover barcode. Also an Avengers 1,000,000 BC with what looks to be a new cover. Seems like an odd choice there.
I have no idea if this is ALL of the covers/packs. But, that’s probably the 8 of them.