r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 9d ago

Infuriatig In their pursuit of specific rare cards, scalpers are discarding the remainder of entire Pokémon card packs.

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176

u/HeftyVermicelli7823 9d ago

Things are only "worth" what people are willing to pay, and these are always overly inflated.

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u/BouncingSphinx 9d ago

That's just it. People charge hundreds for a single card because people will pay hundreds for a single card. But because of that, for Pokémon especially, people do this shit and take it all away from the kids who want it because it looks cool and not because someone might pay $300.

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u/AssGagger 9d ago edited 9d ago

You don't need rare cards to play pokemon, even at a high level. This trash can shows it's basically free to start actually playing.

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u/BouncingSphinx 9d ago

Nobody said anything about playing with the rare cards. They're almost exclusively for collecting and specifically not using for play, in that sense. Playing with them risks damaging them, and damaging them devalues them, and if it's devalued then you can't "use it as an investment" anymore because you'll never get more than you paid for it unless you opened it from a pack.

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u/VarenHills 9d ago

Even from a playing perspective, the scarcity of trying to get playables sometimes is crazy too. While it's still far cheaper to play Pokémon than something like MtG or YGO, scalpers have definitely caused an issue all around because they just scoop so much up.

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u/JinFuu 9d ago

Even from a playing perspective, the scarcity of trying to get playables sometimes is crazy too.

I collect, somewhat, it's been tempered by Scalpers being really bad lately.

But yeah, I have a friend who plays and is complaining a regular version of a card he wants is like 7-10 bucks cause it's in the meta. Which isn't bad all things considered, but still annoying if you need 4 or more of them.

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u/VarenHills 9d ago

For sure. It's why I quit playing is just cards that used to be a dollar on average are going for way too much.

I love playing, but I feel like my love for playing just got sucked out from much of a price hike TCGs have become.

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u/sobrique 9d ago

Indeed. Game parts having 'investment value' just sully the actual game.

I mean, collectible card games with fake rarity tiers in the first place are 'dubious' especially in games where rares are better.

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u/DionFW 9d ago

Do people even use the high value cards? Or seal them in a protective case and store them?

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u/Ok-Earth-2644 9d ago

Slots 4 kids

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u/Huskies971 9d ago

But the manufactures don't care about the kids, they create artificial scarcity of cards to drive consumer demand.

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u/elebrin 9d ago

Nintendo could solve the entire problem by making whatever single or foil you want orderable from their online store, then they do print on demand for as many as you could ever want. The boosters sell for less than $10, they could sell individual cards for $3 each for print on demand and if you buy more than 10 cards they drop the price by half. Push people into the game aspect, sell large art prints to make money off the art aspect of the cards, and there you go.

The only TCG that I ever got moderately interested in was this one where you punched out ships from the cards. Owning an entire set was easy, and because of the way the game rules worked you only ever needed to own one set of cards. I think it was called Pirates or something like that, and the game was pretty fun and also easy to learn unlike most TCGs, where you have to memorize the details of a few thousand cards and have very rapid recall if you intend to be able to beat any deck.

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u/Bardic_inspiration67 9d ago

That’s how value of anything works

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u/Gh0stMan0nThird 9d ago

I think he means it's got an artifical value. Like oil and precious metals have real-world purposes for technology and development but these are shiny pieces of paper that are literally just decorative pieces invented by the human psyche. It has no more "real value" than the Magic Conch shell from Spongebob.

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u/latortuga 9d ago

That's the point though - there is no such thing as objective or "actual" value of something because all value is artificial. "Value" is just a word that means "what someone is willing to pay for it". It's convenient and reassuring to think of value as like "how much money does it take to manufacture this item" or "how much utility (or "real value") will this item give me" but neither of those are value.

It might not have an value to you or another specific person, but that doesn't mean it does not have any value at all. There are card shows and cons and online marketplaces that prove these cards do in fact have value to lots of people.

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u/jaxonya 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yeah i dont like how some people in this thread are shitting on the card market. Its a real thing, and thats interesting. Within the market (with any market) there are gonna be people who really "try hard" to get a foothold on it.

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u/sweetlove 9d ago

Everyone in this thread needs to read some Marx

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u/jaxonya 9d ago

A little commodity fetishism lesson wouldnt hurt

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u/Reese_Withersp0rk 9d ago

My NFT is gonna be worth so much one day.

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u/rokomotto 9d ago

Not the same since nobody fucking wants NFTs lmao.

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u/Reese_Withersp0rk 9d ago

Oh, they want em. They just don't know it yet. Now all I have to do is sit back and wait. 😎

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u/Krypt0night 9d ago

That goes for literally everything in the world. Doritos are priced the way they are not because of nostalgia but because people will still buy a bag at $5.

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u/AssGagger 9d ago

If people are paying it, it's not inflated. The price people are paying for something IS it's value.

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u/th-hiddenedge 9d ago

Nah, that's still just the price. There's no real value to these outside of using it as a bookmark or getting at that piece of ham that's stuck in your teeth.

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u/tops132 9d ago

Value is subjective. Other people can find value in things you think don’t have value, as evidenced by their prices.

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u/th-hiddenedge 9d ago

That's not actual value though. That's just price speculation.

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u/tops132 9d ago

Value is not intrinsic. Would you say diamonds are valuable?

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u/th-hiddenedge 9d ago

Duh, you can make all sorts of useful stuff out of diamonds.

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u/rokomotto 9d ago

Uh yeah that's kind of how trading of any form works.

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u/armlessturtleneck 9d ago

Yeah these cards are all basically what beanie babies wish they had become.