[HN Gopher] Largest card grading service halts submissions
___________________________________________________________________
Largest card grading service halts submissions
Author : maxwell
Score : 24 points
Date : 2021-04-16 18:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.espn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.espn.com)
| jnwatson wrote:
| If this isn't a sign of a super-frothy market top, I don't know
| what is.
|
| There's too much capital chasing too few investment
| opportunities.
| anm89 wrote:
| Markets are obviously insane right now but that doesn't mean
| that the people in the market are irrational.
|
| This bubble is going to pop with a devaluation of the dollar or
| a devaluation of everything else. But just because we are in a
| speculative mania does not mean that the price of assets is
| going to go down moving forward denominated in dollars. It is
| very possible the people shoving their money into baseball
| cards look like geniuses 5 years from now if the alternative
| was holding cash or having zero diversification.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > This bubble is going to pop with a devaluation of the
| dollar or a devaluation of everything else.
|
| I'm not sure where you get the idea that the dollar is
| suddenly going to lose a ton of value. People have been
| calling for this since the beginning of time, just like the
| people who keep trying to short the S&P 500. It's not gonna
| happen, certainly not any time soon.
|
| If it did, however, assets would moon as literally anything
| other than cash is inflation-proof. Moon in units, but remain
| likely quite constant in value.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You might find this interesting
|
| https://inflationchart.com/spx-in-m1
|
| It basically shows the value of the S&P 500 as a function
| of total cash in the system.
| hristov wrote:
| It may also be a sign of people stuck at home going through
| their stuff and trying to find things to do with their time. It
| may be a sign of baseball fans not being able to go to games
| (or being scared of it, if they are able) spending their game
| ticket money on other fun baseball related activities.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. So much money going into this crap, while actually making
| real stuff is in decline in the US.
|
| Someone mentioned "The Days of Perky Pat", by Phillip K. Dick,
| mostly known for "Blade Runner". I found and read that. It's
| relevant.
| fnord77 wrote:
| it's weird - collectible markets in everything are getting
| bubbly. some things even mass produced pocket knives that got
| discontinued a few years ago are going for exorbitant prices.
|
| it's like the internet/social media is creating some mass
| hysteria FOMO in everything.
| [deleted]
| dawnerd wrote:
| People were flipping cotton candy grapes. It's insane.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Man, I've been trying to get these for a couple of years!
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Well, with cards in particular there was a big fad that went
| through the largest streamers a couple months ago. They
| discovered that opening $40k Pokemon boxes hoping for holos
| was an easy way to get massive views. Then that morphed into
| edge lord / troll style content of destroying super rare
| cards. That second part leaves a dirty taste in my mouth as
| these are insanely wealthy 20 something kids essentially
| bragging about how they can flippantly destroy something
| other enthusiasts would be thrilled to even just see at a
| convention, let alone own.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I wonder if anyone saved their Beanie Baby collection from
| the last crash.
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| A good point, I should really dig those out with their
| clear tag protectors and everything. Are eBay sales on fire
| again?
| adamfeldman wrote:
| There are business niches everywhere - I should stop being
| surprised when one becomes visible.
|
| > But the [sports/trading/collectible] card boom had made the
| current growth unsustainable. PSA was receiving 500,000 cards
| every five days, which was more than the company took in every
| three months before the COVID-19 pandemic started. The number of
| packages received per month rose from under 18,000 this past
| November to nearly 30,000 in February, and it eventually caused
| the system to buckle. In its statement, PSA said the company had
| grown from 421 employees in January 2020 to 783 this March, still
| not nearly enough for the surge that has happened over the past
| 12 months.
| someonehere wrote:
| I submitted two unopened packs of Garbage Pail Kids from a
| special set for Universal Monsters (by Super7) to PSA several
| months ago. I was starting to wonder what happened to them after
| I started doing GPK inventory in the last couple of weeks. This
| explains why.
| neaden wrote:
| This whole collector mania is hurting one of my hobbies. Namely
| the Legacy format in Magic: The Gathering. So the idea for this
| format is that all the different sets of MTG cards are legal,
| though some specific cards are banned. Well back in the 90s
| Wizards made a promise to early collectors they would not reprint
| certain cards, creating what is now known as the Reserved List.
| Unfortunately for Legacy, pretty much every Legacy deck requires
| at least some of these Reserved List cards. For most of the
| formats history, this was expensive, but manageable. However now
| the value of many of these format staples has shot through the
| roof, putting it out of the financial reach of a huge selection
| of the player base when it was already considered to be
| expensive.
| coldpie wrote:
| Since you're interested in playing, not collecting, is there a
| reason you can't just use proxies?
| neaden wrote:
| Stores can choose to allow proxies, but they are incentivized
| by Wizards to run a certain number of sanctioned events and
| report attendance, and events that allow proxies can't be
| sanctioned. People will play with proxies for testing
| purposes, but for Friday Night Magic you are expected to have
| legitimate cards.
| willcipriano wrote:
| A small loophole, language doesn't count so you can
| sometimes find cheaper foreign cards online. That's modern
| more than legacy though.
| coldpie wrote:
| Sounds like the problem isn't collectors so much as
| whatever incentives Wizards is setting up, then (along with
| Wizards's refusal to reprint the cards).
| glaring wrote:
| Perhaps I'm just uninformed about the business model of
| trading card games like MTG, but don't they need to set
| these rules for game stores to incentivize players to
| actually buy real cards to play with? Sure, not every
| player participates in tournaments like these, but I
| imagine there is a non-negligible amount of money spent
| by dedicated players who want to keep up with the
| competition when new cards release.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Have you looked into Pioneer? It's my new favorite formate by
| far. It avoids much of the degenerate combos that exist in
| legacy and even modern, yet has some crazy amount of depth. But
| most importantly, NO FETCHLANDS! You don't realize how much
| time and energy every deck constantly fetching takes up until
| you play without them.
| neaden wrote:
| Unfortunately I enjoy the degenerate combos and brainstorm
| shenanigans to much to let them go.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| So what you're saying is I probably should go dig out the boxes
| of MTG cards I have from being a kid in the mid-90s? I haven't
| thought about those in decades!
| chmod600 wrote:
| I've wondered about the asymmetry of information someone finding
| a bunch of cards in the garage. Maybe worth a lot, but would cost
| a lot just to find out. A collector could just bid on bulk cards,
| but how would they know it's not picked clean of the good ones?
|
| So is the value essentially zero?
| dawnerd wrote:
| > A collector could just bid on bulk cards, but how would they
| know it's not picked clean of the good ones?
|
| Lots of trust. A good collector will glance through it and
| determine if it's something they want to take on. Those bulk
| sets are usually sold cheap enough that it's worth the risk.
|
| I've sold a few sets and made clear each time that I'd an eBay
| seller and glanced through them but didn't have time to really
| dig in.
|
| If you're just blinding buying lots online though you're gonna
| get screwed.
| DivisionSol wrote:
| To describe a microcosm of this line of thinking, let's take
| Pokemon cards. Packs containing a (foil/holo) card weigh more.
| A sealed box of packs is theoretically a gold mine. But how do
| you establish that the presealed box wasn't raided and
| resealed? A whole system of trusty discoverers and buyers play
| hand in hand.
|
| Individual packs will always be looked at with doubt, since
| they've probably been weighed and sorted.
| [deleted]
| runnr_az wrote:
| Not into the card world at all, but I recently watched a baseball
| card investor / dealer's explanation on YouTube... pretty
| interesting:
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLroSNu2WrMA9eUAXrbWIhyAQ7...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-16 22:01 UTC)