For a winning bid of $42 on eBay, my 12-year-old son won the right to every St. Louis Cardinals card from a case of baseball cards. With 6 boxes in a case, 10 packs in a box and 46 cards in a pack, that’s 2,760 cards to draw from.
Depending on your age and your proximity to The Hobby, your reaction to that is probably either “you paid how much to who for what?” or “oh, you bought into a break.”
I don’t know exactly when baseball card breaks became “a thing.” They certainly weren’t around when I was a kid collecting cards, so I can pinpoint their origin to sometime between 1994 and last night.