My local wal-mart recently moved their cards to behind the customer service desk.
I had seen wal-mart TCG sections completely trashed (littered with open packaging, or boxes torn open and partially scavenged), and I know that even without this destructive method, there are other ways to "cheat" by weighing packs with a scale.
Seems like locking them in a case like video games is probably in the future for most physical stores that continue carrying them? Even before fistfights over cards from this year.
Foil weighs more than paper. Don’t think I could do it now, but when I was a little kid with little kid arms, I could slightly perceive the difference in weight between Yu-Gi-Oh packs. Had a pretty good success rate too, but it annoyed the folks at Blockbuster watching me rummage through the box at the register doing this so the real challenge was finding a store that would let me pick my packs.
This reminds me of my grandma who claimed she could tell if a Kinder Surprise egg had a plastic toy or one of the, often more desired, figurines in it by shaking it a certain way. That always impressed me. I wonder if that's why she did it or if it was to amuse me. I miss my grandma.
Are Yu-Gi-Oh cards worth much now? Have a huge collection. Unfortunately my we’ll-meaning mom wrote my initials in sharpie on the back of a bunch of the cards so that people wouldn’t steal them, LOL. I’m wondering what kind of cleaner will take the sharpie off but not damage the cards.
Isopropyl alcohol would do it. Extremely unlikely to do any damage, but try on one first just in case. Use cotton pads.
And get some 99.99% stuff, not this "rubbing" crap.
Probably merely having played with them will nick a big chunk of the value; collectors are looking for perfect condition, mint cards.
That said, I found https://yugiohprices.com/ if you wanted to take a look; there are some super-valuable ones, but it sounds like they were extreme rarities for special events, and otherwise the top card is just $444.44.
> I’m wondering what kind of cleaner will take the sharpie off but not damage the cards.
If you ever were established as a go-to knowledge source for Yu-Gi-Oh or an adjacent domain, those sharpie initials could actually increase the value of those cards…
...good point. If I’m famous one day, the cards could be significantly more valuable.
I’m not strapped for cash (knock on wood) right now so I plan to hold on to them indefinitely, until an obvious reason to sell or give them away appears.
Keep in mind that The Pokemon Company don't make profit off of secondary sales, so they don't really have much incentive to make it a casino. In fact, I believe in the past they avoided this problem by printing cards to such capacity that prices don't dramatically rise due to lack of scarcity.
(special circumstances like very old first edition prints still hold value for obvious reasons, but The Pokemon Company can't realistically make profit off of them now that they are out of print)
Currently they aren't able to do so because of a combination of an insane increase in demand and COVID, but ultimately this seems like a temporary problem that fixes itself once they get facilities in order to meet the demand.
> Keep in mind that The Pokemon Company don't make profit off of secondary sales, so they don't really have much incentive to make it a casino. In fact, I believe in the past they avoided this problem by printing cards to such capacity that prices don't dramatically rise due to lack of scarcity.
The fact that the card pack has a randomness element makes the card pack more valuable in the first place. This is exactly how gamification and random reward schedules drive revenue.
The point of the product is to gamble, not to determine in advance which one has the best outcome or odds.
In much the same way that a casino won't let you hover around and count cards, or watch a machine all day and only play when you've determined that it's about to cache out. They take other countermeasures against that stuff these days but you get the idea.
> The point of the product is to gamble, not to determine in advance which one has the best outcome or odds.
The manufacturer’s goal is to leverage the addictive behavior associated with gambling to get money while not being restricted in market reach (as to venues, eligible purchasers) or profits by regulations and taxes targeting gambling, sure.
That’s not the buyer’s goal, though, and I see no reason that the manufacturer’s buyer-hostile attempt to hack around laws designed to protect against and provide resources to mitigate exactly the kind of predation it is engaging in deserves particular respect.
> In much the same way that a casino won't let you hover around and count cards
Casinos, by law, where permitted to operate at all, in many jurisdictions wouldn’t let most of the market for the goods in question even on the floor except to make through transit, specifically to protect them from gambling.
If the people that care most about rare cards target them more effectively rather than buying however many packs needed to get them randomly, how can it not?
And, also, if those playing by the rules that the manufacturer set up get less of a “ooh shiny” bump to keep playing by the rules than is designed, again, how can it not?
In the small, it still mostly feels like you're unfairly changing the rules of the game out from underneath the next person to walk in the store. By analogy, it's not ethical to rig someone else's slot machine to steal people's money and pay it out only to you - even if you think slot machines themselves are unethical. Claiming to be be curing them of their gambling addiction seems... convenient.
You know that, and I know that, but legal weenies and regulators go to great pains to make it clear that it's not gambling, as do defenders of the "sport". And to be clear I love me some MtG, so I am not criticizing the model or the industry.
That said, if weighing the packs as a viable strategy became common knowledge and is even a marginally reliable method for gaming the system, then there would be a solid case to be made that the companies that produce that these cards need explicit countermeasures to prevent that strategy.
If they don't, and there is a real secondary market, then there is nothing stopping an FLGS from selling individual packs from a box after having weighed all of the packs. The only way to protect yourself from the game being rigged would be to buy guaranteed unopened boxes.
People who buy Pokemon/MtG cards have an interesting relationship with WotC.
They're usually perfectly willing to buy cards on the secondary market (which doesn't make WotC money) but they're constitutionally unable to play "real" (non-"casual") matches — even in tournaments WotC has no relationship to! — if the cards are https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Proxy_card s.
I've never been clear on what the difference is. Both the secondary market, and proxies, result in perfectly usable cards, and result in WotC making no money from you. But one's acceptable to the community, while the other very much isn't.
I have a feeling it's probably to do with the community having a lot of collectors in it, who want their rare cards to retain value, and who fear that that value would be lost if there's no reason to play with the card, only to hide it away in a binder while playing with a proxy.
WotC of course strongly benefits indirectly from the secondary market as it makes packs more desirables (and in fact packs and boxes are priced close to their Expected Value). It is not a surprise that they are strongly opposed to proxies. And most non-WotC tournament organizers of course have strong relationships with WotC.
But a store isn't a casino, it's a store. AFAIK, a company can't prohibit anyone from inspecting their product on store shelves before buying. I would certainly expect to be able to weigh, say, a pack of batteries, and use their weigh as a part of my buying decision.
The store can do whatever they want (within discrimination laws). If they say Hot Wheels collectors can’t look at every single one on the shelf, and doing so will get you banned, they can do that.
Sort of, but it's unfair when you're buying booster packs online from folks that might be selling you pre-weighed packs from booster boxes. For this reason, you're really best off only buying booster boxes or individual cards online unless you really trust the seller.
It used to be you could see what cards were in a Magic the Gathering booster without opening it by pushing each card one at a time to the edge of the pack and shining a bright light behind it. The edge of the packaging was white, so the name of the card would shine through.
I think most people into collectible card games know boosters aren't to be trusted in general.
In addition to weighting, there was also a know vulnerability in the pseudo-rng method used in printing that allowed to know which boisters of a box were the most likely to contains the good cards (speaking of MTG).
Mostly because by taking the high value packs, one leaves nothing for the other players/collectors (especially children, for whom boosters are the only potential source of rare cards, since they're unlikely to have the funds nor internet access to buy individual cards online).
If you want a specific card you should buy that specific card. Packs are not designed so you know what is in them. Weighing them seems like petty cheating to me.
Thats just my opinion though, I know moral debates like this are highly subjective.
Again, if you don’t want to gamble then you’re free to buy individual cards where you know exactly what you’re getting.
Even if you weigh the decks you’re still gambling, as you have no idea what is inside the packs until you break the seal. You’re just cheating to improve your odds.
If you don’t want to gamble then the obvious solution is to buy individual cards and not cheat others out of random decks.
I think it’s more ridiculous that your position is advocating bringing a gram scale into Target with you so that you can weigh cards off the shelf in order to gain a slight advantage.
I know it isn’t illegal, and never claimed it was. I think it’s poor form, morally speaking. That’s why I added the ‘morals are subjective’ part to my original comment.
It isn’t illegal to cheat at your local pickup basketball game either, that doesn’t make it a good thing to do.
Just because you have an opportunity to do something, and it's not explicitly forbidden by any laws or 'terms of service' or whatever, doesn't make it okay.
Imagine that I went to a store, identified every booster pack with a rare card in it via weight, and then bought all of them. Then let's imagine someone else walks in. This buyer is a reasonable person, but not savvy enough to know that booster packs with rare cards are easily identified. He buys the packs thinking that his chances of getting a rare card are 5% when they are really 0%.
Do you feel that that was wrong of me to do? Or was it the other buyer's fault for not being smart enough to already know that someone like me would have come along and done what I did?
In this case it is OK, because this isn't gambling, according to what the manufactures claim, and they go to great lengths to claim that it is not gambling.
If it is not covered under gambling laws, and the manufactures declare that all cards have no monetary value, then I see no problem at all.
> Do you feel that that was wrong of me to do?
No, it is not wrong at all, because the manufactures say that it is not gambling. Therefore this is fair game.
What I find humorous about it is Pokemon puts these code cards that give you a booster in the online game. They have a greyish one and a green one. If you get a green one you got a foil 100% in the pack so what I don't get is why don't they just make the grey one thicker to compensate for the weight difference?
I've always seen (at Walmart and other department stores) collectibles and trading cards in a special isle near checkout seemingly to thwart theft. Some items were/are actually behind checkout, not accessible without asking.
For the tiny amount of revenue this product likely generates for Target, and that the relationship with the manufacturer is probably of little concern to them makes a lot of sense.
Factoring in theft, safety issues, and associate time spent they have to be selling this product at a significant loss.
Only to a certain extent. If they got an extra 50 people into a store on a drop day, is that really going to help much when weighed against the downsides?
My target has 50 people walk in and out several times an hour, so unless these campers are buying a bunch of other stuff while there, there's not a lot of value in it.
I was at my Target very early last week to pick up gift cards for a friend. There was a line of at least 3 dozen adults queued up outside to get in for the TCGs. They had special lines for them to check out, also filled with adults.
Kids are at school while these booster packs are being bought out...
I have seen so many things skyrocket in value over the past year, from Pokeman cards to classics cars to houses, cryptocurrencies, tech stocks and on and on. Some of these are assets and some are collectibles and some are consumables. But none of it seems to be driven by general inflation. Have we seen this kind of scenario in economics before? Is this a known phenomenon?
I don't know jack about economics, but to be perfectly honest it's making me very anxious - not because of the high prices, but because I know moments of exuberance are often paid for in the not too distant future.
I played some of these for fun with a few friends (more playtime in Yu-gi-oh than pokemon, granted).
What I've found fun, especially as the game has evolved to well past the number of mechanics we would nostalgically like to play with, is to build sets of balanced decks that we can each randomly play to pick with, facing pre-builts of similar power against each other, so it's back to being a game of chance and basic strategy at playtime.
We do miss (and sometimes use online players to do so) playing with deck design as part of the competition, since using digital cards we aren't as limited by wallets.
This reminds me of those championship decks they sell every year (with different backs so you can't use the cards officially.) Playing with a pre-built pro deck is super fun. It's amazing how fast they set up with their little engines.
I did that with Magic. It was super fun, specially because I sucked at deck building and also didn't want to spent all my money trying to get cards that could (not) be useful to me
I heard the problem was not theft, it was big guys showing up at store opening and bulk-buying the whole stock of cards, threatening staff with violence if not allowed to do so.
Then the supplemental problem of normal customers complaining all day that the cards are sold out.
Retailers usually have agreements with vendors to sell at the manufacturer's retail price and to advertise at the manufacturer's advertised price. This came out of a 2007 Supreme Court decision: Leegin Leather Products vs. PSKS Inc.
I only know about this because I used to purchase a lot of cigars from a large volume discounter and they were forced to raise prices dramatically due to the outcome of that ruling.
Pokemon cards are a gambling racket. No manufacturer is going to be happy with their direct customers raising the bar to entry on said racket.
In the USSR, when it still existed, retail prices were stamped on the items at the manufacturing plant, because of how stable the prices (and the economy in general) were. After the collapse, this practice had stopped entirely for obvious reasons.
So the fact that such a thing as "manufacturer's retail prices" still exist, in the USA of all places, and that they apparently has some legal weight was a surprise to me. TIL.
Well, I guess you can consider a manufacturer to be either an actual manufacturing company that sells directly to wholesalers or retailers OR a company that owns a brand which purchases product in bulk to sell to wholesalers or retailers.
Either way, a lot of companies want their products to be seen in a certain "class" of products, and it's harder to maintain that brand image from a pricing standpoint if everyone can just sell it at whatever they want.
So, what happened at this large discount cigar place is that, like I said, they were doing something similar to Wal-Mart's strategy: sell a ton of product at a low profit margin and force manufacturers to come down in prices as a result. The manufacturers hated it because (a) their existence relied on the good will of this corporate behemoth, and (b) supplying so much product to the discounter meant less was available around the country for retail shops, which is essential to building brand loyalty. When Leegin happened, the discounter begrudgingly admitted that they would be forced to raise prices. But not before buying out a few accessory manufacturers.
While not as popular as simply discounting cigars, it sorta worked for them. They would sell a box of cigars at the lowest price that they could and then include a free humidor to store them in. And what collector of stuff doesn't want another container for their stuff?
I'll say too, that some manufacturers simply refused to do business with the volume discounter until after Leegin. They had built up a market for themselves with independent shops without needing to go to the volume discounter... but after they could be ensured that their prices would be stable, they opened the floodgates.
> it's harder to maintain that brand image from a pricing standpoint if everyone can just sell it at whatever they want
Does this apply to discounters only? The PS5 (and earlier, PS4) resellers are re-selling them at premium, but AFAIK Sony doesn't go after them, at all.
> (b) supplying so much product to the discounter meant less was available around the country for retail shops
...don't supply to the discounter so much then? Don't the manufacturers usually supply the retail chains first and only then dump whatever left to the discounters anyhow?
which resellers? I would have to imagine that anyone buying directly from Sony and marking up their products would catch the ire of the company, but maybe not. MAP and MRP are more about the downward pressure on prices, not upward, so that companies can't come back later and say "I can't sell your product and make a profit because I'm selling it for too cheap."
The discounter largely doesn't care as much because of the sheer volume they were doing. They were selling at near half the price of what brick and mortar shops were selling AND this was during a time where most states were not charging taxes on internet purchases OR on tobacco sales.
Say you have a box of cigars that has an MSRP for $100 a box. Break even price is $50. Discounter sells for $60 and offers free shipping. You go to the local store and buy for $100. Then you get hit with a 30% tobacco tax and a 9% sales tax. So now you're comparing $60 vs $139. Even if they didn't have what you want in stock, they probably would have something else you'd like for a fraction of the cost.
Most mom and pop cigar stores carry about $50-200K worth of inventory at any one time. This discounter was doing mail order business and had about $80-100M worth of inventory.
The price policy just created shortages, so yes the item was stamped with a price, but unless you knew someone who owed you a favor or slipped the clerk something extra under the table, it would be hard for you to purchase it for that price. This also led to endless queueing, where standing in line was a full time job. It would not be uncommon to wait in line for a few hours when rumors spread that a particular store got some bread in, or that a butcher finally had some meat. This job was then assigned to grandmothers and others who did not have to show up to work -- to basically spend all day standing in line in front of various stores, hoping to come back with some groceries.
That created an entire black market economy of side payments and private goods which were not stamped with a price, but the government tolerated this economy because they knew that without it, many household essentials could not be obtained. That normalization of bribes meant that if you had to go a doctor and wanted to be treated decently, a side payment was required. If your car broke down (although most people learned to fix most issues on their own) a side payment was required. If some apples became available and you wanted to get one, a little money or barter was needed. Maybe you had an uncle in the country who made some sausage, that could be exchanged for a dental visit in which anesthetic was provided. So the economy began to devolve to barter. If you were not good at politics and you had nothing to barter, life was pretty hard. I once traded a pack of sunflower seeds for private access to a UNESCO world heritage site. The friend of my uncle who was running the restoration (one of those eternal ongoing projects started in the 50s) unlocked the doors for me and let me crawl around the scaffolding. I was able to touch the frescos! But, you see, I had the desired sunflower seeds.
This is portrayed beautifully in many underground books and even some mainstream books like Master and Margarita, where the main objective of everyone in the novel was obtaining an apartment in Moscow. Yes, those apartments were cheap, but available only to insiders or members of the nomenklatura. Hence the endless jockeying, politicking, and finagling to get onto various secret waiting lists or catch the favor of a government official who might in their beneficence put you on the right list.
The USA's capitalist image aside, price tags per se are as American as apple pie, having been invented by Quakers, who found haggling/price discrimination immoral. They caught on in industry because they helped optimize the checkout process. [1] (Consumerism is arguably more strongly tied to the American identity than capitalism.)
The concept of MSRP to me (as an American) is not too far removed from that of the price tag, which I guess makes it not too surprising to me that MSRPs are culturally normalized here.
MAP is a factor online too. Google Shopping, Amazon marketplace... All of them have MAP as an input field for data providers that describe products they make. In Google's case, it creates a floor on the value that Shopping will list for the price of a product (though you can sometimes find cheaper via a non-Shopping main page search, or by going through the main portal of an online retailer).
From what I’ve read and come to understand, NFTs may one day become meaningful if they are legally recognized as a claim to ownership. Then, they can serve as a decentralized, easily sold form of copyright. To sell IP for example now, you need a bunch of lawyers and everything is all on paper anyways. There’s nothing tangible to exchange; it’s all dependent on contracts, lawyers. NFTs could expedite this process according to people whom I’ve asked what possible usefulness NFTs could have.
Bullshit. You're describing a system to replace the paper and ink part of copyright, at best. What you're proposing would still need law behind it to be meaningful as a replacement for copyright itself. So then what's the point?
Only the law stops you from using IP without permission today. And only the law will stop you with what you propose.
It's useful to keep track of ownership of digital goods. And if you did it in a centralized way there are issues with that. We have seen with Amazon and Apple that there can be issues with ownership getting revoked, or services being discontinued as with Google music. It may also not be transferrable. And if you instead make the Government keep track of who owns what there can be some privacy concerns.
Yes it would need to be fit into a legal framework, and would benefit by being integrated with centralized systems made by companies. I think you are arguing against some kind of "everything should be fully decentralized" ideal, which is not what this would be. Rather, it could offer clear benefits here and now by integrating with current systems and institutions.
The reason I used to buy these was to play the game with my siblings and friends. If I wanted to have a computer involved I would have just played the official video game (which is pretty cool too, but only some of my friends enjoyed that.)
As a kid, nobody had a clue how to play the game properly. But the pokemon tcg video game forced you to play it properly, and was pretty fun. Digital formats have appeal.
I was a kid when Pokemon first hit the states. All of us that collected them knew how to play. The game wasn't difficult and it already attracted a nerdy crowd to boot. At that, "house rules" are typically more fun than original. A digital version would stifle that.
But the TCG game let you get any card in the game without paying extra or there being limits to ownership. That's a good digital format, and adding NFTs to it provides no value-add. Probably negative value-add.
I think I agree. The problem with a traditional TCG is that there's a small set of cards. One could imagine a really cool NFT based game with only unique cards, and permadeath rules that cause you to actually lose the card when used or lost or whatever.
Maybe treat the NFT as a license of ownership that must be transferred if the card is traded, and let the owner of the NFT reprint the card for a fee in case the card is damaged or otherwise lost
The other thing I was imagining was that trading a card could just utilize existing nft platforms, instead of the publisher having to set up an ecommerce marketplace for managing card trades.
Although yeah this is definitely more "solution looking for a problem"
Actually the publisher wouldn't even need to have a db full of keys or maintain a catalog of valid NFTs. Authenticity could be proven by just seeing whether the initial owner/issuer of the NFT is the publisher
Strictly ties a given card's value to its rarity, instead of rarity*condition. Mainly useful for, well, rare cards.
If you own a rare card and damage it or lose the physical version, it's okay because the publisher will send you a new one for a small fee.
On top of this, it acts as proof of authenticity; if someone's trying to sell a rare card, instead of the buyer having to figure out whether it's a fake, the seller just has to prove ownership of the NFT and ideally the publisher would maintain a catalog of valid NFTs.
Trading these cards can use existing nft platforms instead of the publisher having to handle marketplace concerns; all the publisher needs to do is be able to issue the NFT to the owner of the physical card
> If you own a rare card and damage it or lose the physical version, it's okay because the publisher will send you a new one for a small fee.
Is this a real issue?
> On top of this, it acts as proof of authenticity; if someone's trying to sell a rare card, instead of the buyer having to figure out whether it's a fake, the seller just has to prove ownership of the NFT and ideally the publisher would maintain a catalog of valid NFTs.
This just shifts the burden to authenticity of the NFT. How does that help?
In a sense? It's an issue that there are a number of solutions for, from card sleeves to just being super careful. Having this possibility available would probably hurt the industry around protecting cards.
> This just shifts the burden to authenticity of the NFT. How does that help?
Proving authenticity of the NFT is easier than proving authenticity of the card? The latter involves intimate knowledge of the properties of the card, and the former just involves looking at the NFT and seeing whether the first owner/issuer was the publisher.
I assume by using the private key to sign a message. If the card holder doesn't also hold the NFT, they can't transfer the NFT to the buyer.
My understanding is that NFTs are useful when the cost of preventing theft, forgeries, etc. is higher than the cost of protecting a private key. If "ownership" is agreed to require proof of holding the NFT as well, then it's not good enough to steal some cards from Target, you have to also steal the private key for each card, or coerce the owner to transfer the NFTs to you, etc. I guess we could think of it as a kind of two factor auth?
Proof that the person who claims to be current owner, is the person that the previous owner transferred ownership to (I guess more specifically, proof that they hold the private key). And simultaneously, proof that owner n-1 is who owner n-2 transferred ownership to, etc.
Decentralized consensus based authorization backed by the blockchain, instead of relying on some central authority to verify and enforce the validity of the contract?
At least, afaik that's the concept behind ethereum's "Smart Contracts"
> Maybe treat the NFT as a license of ownership that must be transferred if the card is traded, and let the owner of the NFT reprint the card for a fee in case the card is damaged or otherwise lost
How would you do that - $0 for a card and $300,000 for the license of ownership? Possession of a card is ownership. How would someone even reprint holographic cards? This, unfortunately, isn't doable.
I wasn't imagining the Owner reprinting the card, but that the publisher is providing the reprints as a service to those who own the nft.
Specifically, I'm imagining a case where people still go to the store, buy a card, and each card comes with a QR code or something. You can go online, scan the QR code, and have the NFT representing that physical card transferred to your NFT deck.
You could play games virtually with only cards that you have Proven you own, and if you ever lose the physical card the publisher will send you a new copy.
A key idea here is that every Instance of a card would have a unique identifier and thus a unique NFT; two people scanning the QR code for the same card shouldn't result in them both getting the NFT.
Thank you for the explanation. Most people want to see their physical card in front of them.
In the system you describe people would almost certainly sell the NFT and keep the physical card, while saying they lost it. This would drive the value of collector's memorabilia down to zero. Nobody really cares about NFTs.
I guess I'm imagining tournament use playing a role, but more generally tying the concept of ownership & legitimacy to the NFT. Ideally it would move the value of the asset into the digital representation instead of the physical, which is what would happen if the physical representation of the asset is easily replicated.
Like sure they could sell the NFT and keep the physical card, but at that point the physical card is now illegitimate. And a lot of the value is in legitimacy, right? If the only value was the physical representation, couldn't a collector could just print a counterfeit?
NFTs work when the important part is the abstract idea of "owning the thing", where the value of the thing is more extrinsic than intrinsic. The specific idea here is making the physical representation is worthless, putting all the value in the digital one. People would start caring a lot about NFTs if it was the "One True Source" of legitimacy.
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If we wanted to have both representations be equally as valuable, the idea would instead be to have to trade in the card to get the NFT. Trading in the card would involve burning the physical representation and issuing a digital one. If you want the physical rep back, trade the NFT back for a printed card.
Good luck recovering those NFTs you bought and forgot about 20 years ago. At least people's old MTG cards might still be in the back of a childhood closed.
I had seen wal-mart TCG sections completely trashed (littered with open packaging, or boxes torn open and partially scavenged), and I know that even without this destructive method, there are other ways to "cheat" by weighing packs with a scale.
Seems like locking them in a case like video games is probably in the future for most physical stores that continue carrying them? Even before fistfights over cards from this year.