Stumbling On A Cure?

Since prices are through the roof for just about anything but dime box fodder, this may apply to a slightly larger audience these days.  It's going to take some more experimentation, but I might have found something that works to cure a problem that occurs with bulk commons, and that is Bricking.  Chunks of cards that are stuck together from being stored in damp environments that interact with the waxy coating.  With some more modern card finishes, you can snap them apart and they stay intact, but with others (I'm looking at you 2003 Topps), they tear little spots and come out speckled.  I wrote about this before in this post.

Recently, I bought a group of small extension sets to a junk wax football product.  They were all still neatly shrink wrapped, but when I opened them, they were stuck together.  Not completely, but it took some effort to get certain ones apart.  Long story short, I had an idea about another method to separate these cards. 

I got a new humidifier for Christmas this past year.  It's one of those that constantly puts out a large plume of mist into the air.  Looks like this:

Figuring moisture that dries is what sticks cards together, why wouldn't moisture reverse the process?

So I held the stuck cards over the mist stream, while pushing them gently apart so the mist could go between them.  

Not my best photographic work

After about 10 or 15 seconds, the cards seemed to come apart a lot easier.  They kinda separated on their own.  And they came out cleaner than the ones I pulled apart manually.  I made sure to wipe the water droplets off the cards when I removed them from the mist.

One disclaimer ~ the group I used the humidifier on was also in the freezer for about an hour or two.  Not sure if that contributed.  They didn't come apart immediately after removal from the freezer, so I don't think that helped much.  I've heard about other people trying that with mixed results. 

The card on the left was just manually pulled apart.  The one on the right got the mist treatment.  There are a lot less speckles on it.  Again, there are other variables at work here, like if they were all exposed to the exact same environment, position in the original package, etc.

Fortunately, I came out with two reasonably intact sets of these particular cards, which is all I needed.  If I had tried the humidifier trick on more of them, I may have ended up with less speckling on a lot of them.  But I hadn't thought of it until I had unwrapped almost the whole batch.

If you have a similar humidifier and come across some bricked cards, try this method and report back your results.