Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of ASMR videos on YouTube to help me fall asleep. I watch all sorts of random things: people shopping for DVDs, eating food, brushing their hair, pretending to be Librarians, etc. Just the weirdest, most random shit. My latest obsession: watching people open packs of baseball cards. This gave me a million dollar idea: baseball card bingo.
Here’s what I’m thinking. Get all the people in your fantasy baseball or football league to chip in like $50. Then have the league commissioner buy some packs of trading cards. Then everyone watches (either in person or over Zoom) as the league commissioner opens up all the packs of cards. Let’s say the first card is Mike Trout. Whoever owns Mike Trout in the league is now one step closer to getting Bingo. The first person to have their entire team represented in the packs wins the pot, less the cost of buying the packs!
This same concept could apply to anyone, not just people in existing leagues. Just assign people a bunch of random players and then gather together while someone opens packs. To make things interesting you could even let people pick their players instead of assigning them (like in a real fantasy league) and to make things harder you could have people choose a starting lineup from a larger player pool which may add an element of strategy to the endeavor if people actually get to the point where they know which cards are more popular than others.
This idea could be a real boon to YouTube personalities as well with the people who have made a living “breaking” boxes and opening packs now getting paid to serve as Bingo hosts. In fact, anyone could get paid for this role. Could you imagine hiring a celebrity off of Cameo to be your league’s bingo host? How cool would that be?!
And the idea doesn’t even have to be limited to sports. There are trading cards for pretty much everything these days such as Marvel superheroes or TV show characters. Some baseball card packs even contain cards of random celebrities in them. There are plenty of opportunities to get creative with the rules for your fantasy bingo league. You could even play this game more than once and keep track of long-term standings. Maybe even getting to the point where you’d rather just play baseball card bingo than manage your real fantasy teams.
I really feel like this ideas has a lot of merit. It’s everything you love about your fantasy league: the camaraderie, the competition, the fandom associated with following your favorite players and teams, without all the stress of suffering through actual games as they unfold. There’s no time wasted managing a roster. No kicking yourself after you make a bad trade. No losing your shit every time you get a bad beat and lose by a narrow margin. There’s just pure, unbridled joy. The kind that only Bingo can provide. If you don’t believe me just ask your grandma.
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