Is It Permissible to Resell Sealed Trading Card Boxes?

Answered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Question

I am considering starting a business reselling trading cards and want to inform myself before I start. On sealed products, the customer pays a fixed, known price for a sealed box. The general contents are stated on the packaging, but which cards are inside is unknown until it is opened, to me as well as to him, and there is a possible gap in value between a disappointing box and one holding a rare card. Is that sales model permissible, and under what conditions? The cards also depict fictional creatures, some with supernatural powers, and I have seen opinions diverge sharply on selling them. Is that permissible? And if I proceed on the most favourable opinion I can find, would the earnings be lawful?

Answer

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

Thank you for asking before you begin rather than after; that is the mark of someone who wants his earnings to be sound.

Selling Sealed Boxes Is a Valid Sale, Not a Game of Chance

The sales model you describe is sound in the Hanafi school. Buying sealed trading card products at a known price and reselling them is ordinary trade in a tangible good, and income from such trade is lawful. The pictures on the cards are the harder matter, and scholars differ over them, so take the model as settled and the illustrations as the cautious side of this venture.

The condition for a valid sale is not that the buyer know every particular of what he is buying. Imam Kasani (Allah have mercy on him) puts it as “that the object of sale and its price be known with a knowledge that prevents dispute. If one of the two is unknown with an unknowingness that leads to dispute, the sale is invalid; and if it is unknown with an unknowingness that does not lead to dispute, it is not invalid.” [Kasani, Badaʾiʿ al-Sanaʾiʿ] The school goes further and validates the purchase of a thing the buyer has not yet examined at all, which it treats under the option of inspection (khiyar al-ruʾya).

A sealed box states its product line, the number of packs, the number of cards, and the price, which is fixed before any money changes hands. The buyer knows the class of goods he is receiving, and he receives exactly that quantity. What he does not know is which particular cards fall inside, and that is a variation of quality within a known class, not ignorance of what he bought. The uncertainty (gharar) that voids a sale is not the same as this.

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) forbade “the sale of the pebble and the sale of uncertainty.” [Muslim] The sale of the pebble was that a stone was thrown, and whatever it landed on was the thing sold, so chance settled the contract rather than the two parties. Paying for a virtual pack is close to that, because the money buys a draw. A physical box is not, because the money buys a determinate quantity of a manufactured good that arrives, regardless of what is printed inside it.

Sell factory-sealed product with its contents printed on the packaging, at a stated price, and describe your stock exactly as it is. Do not sell resealed or tampered boxes, and keep your advertising off the rare card a customer might chance upon.

The Pictures Are the Cautious Part of This Trade

In the illustrations, the Hanafi discussion concerns making images, keeping them in the home, and praying towards them, and it turns on whether the image is being honored. Imam Kasani writes that “images are disliked in houses… because keeping them is a resemblance to the worshippers of idols, except when they are on rugs or on the small cushions that are laid on the ground to be sat upon, in which case they are not disliked, because treading them underfoot is a degradation of them, so keeping them in a place of degradation is not a resemblance to the worshippers of idols,” and that they are disliked “on curtains, on the cloths hung upon the wall, on large cushions, and on the ceiling, for the honouring of them that this involves.” [Kasani, Badaʾiʿ al-Sanaʾiʿ]

You may fairly object that these creatures are animate forms, and that the school’s default is to dislike keeping such pictures at all. That is so, and the exception in the passage turns on where the image sits rather than on what it shows: a picture in a place of degradation is not the resemblance the school is guarding against. A card that is handled, shuffled, sleeved, and boxed is a long way from an image raised up to be revered, and you neither draw these pictures nor open the packs. But the passage speaks of images kept and displayed, not of trading in flat printed pictures of animate beings, so carrying it across to a card is a considered extension of the school’s reasoning rather than something the text itself states. Some scholars, including those in answers published on our own site, decline this trade on account of the pictures.

Earnings Are Sound When You Have Genuinely Consulted a Scholar

As for your third question, earnings from a valid sale are lawful earnings, and a man who acts on a ruling he received from a qualified scholar has done what was asked of him. Should that scholar prove to have been mistaken, the income is not thereby tainted, and you carry no sin for it. What matters is why you hold the position: hold it because a scholar you trust holds it and you have put your case to him, not because it was the lightest answer you could find.

Begin small while you learn the trade, and keep a scholar you can return to as the business grows.

And Allah knows best.

Faraz Rabbani

Related Answers

• Is It Permissible for Us to Purchase Mystery Leftover Food Bags? — a close parallel: paying a known price for a bag whose exact contents are unknown is sound, since the buyer knows the general class of what’s inside.
• Is Paying for Packs in a Video Game Gambling? — the mirror image of this ruling: a virtual pack whose contents are pure chance falls into gambling, unlike a physical, manufactured product.
• What Is the Ruling on Photographing, Filming, and Drawing Animate Life? — lays out the genuine scholarly difference over images of living things that this answer’s caution rests on.
• Can I Create Cartoon Characters from Objects and Imaginary Forms for an Educational Game? — addresses fictional and incomplete figures directly, relevant to cards depicting invented creatures.
• What Are the Limits of Taking Easier Opinions Across Madhabs? — the discipline behind holding a position because a trusted scholar holds it, not because it happens to be the lightest one available.