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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

My kids are into collecting pokemon cards big time. We have this conversation pretty frequently; why didn't I buy pokemon cards in the 90's? We'd be rich! I try to tell them about the over production and glut in collectible cards in the 90's but it really doesn't sink in. At the time we had just come off the beanie baby and pog fads. I personally had no interest in buying any thing. I still have no clue why these cards are "worth" as much as they say they are. On the other hand those black lotus mtg cards I used to see for $10, that is real scarcity I understand.

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Yea, what the other people are missing is there were 100+ other collectable pieces of shit that ended up in the dump worth nothing. The people that managed to buy the right crap, then keep it for decades are the ones that effectively won a lottery. But really it was pure chance they happened to win.

And the ur-example is baseball cards. My dad's childhood collection was worth something like $40K in the 90s. He literally bought about 800 of them over 3-4 years in the mid-late 50s, then not only lost interest in them but in baseball completely, and the cards sat in the same clean, dry, temperature-controlled basement for 40 years until they became lottery tickets.

What everyone needs to do is to take that hobby when you bought a lot of rare, fragile stuff, and publish a high-priced coffee table book about it. Some rich bore will use that book and his money to simulate a personality, and other jealous idiots will try to imitate him, bidding up the prices.

Why does anyone say this type of thing? Someone with different interests from you isn't simulating anything. They are just being a person with interests. Honestly I disdain those who speak about such interests condescendingly much more than I would anyone who chooses to spend their money on a hobby.

Pretty much anything sold as collectible, by definition, isn’t.

Not always. M:TG has always been sold as a collectible card game, and many of its early cards are extremely valuable.

Aren't the ones that are valuable mostly misprints and low volume variants?

Not necessarily variants or misprints, but many old powerful cards are extremely expensive. By this point the volume is much lower just due to time, but many cards from the first ~4 sets are worth hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the card and condition.

No, but they are from the first couple sets when production runs were smaller. WotC has made a promise to the community that they will never reprint (tournament legal versions of) some of those early cards which helps keeps them rare and expensive.

You wouldn't really want those cards reprinted anyways. They're very overpowered and seem like amateur design if you look at them through a lens of the rest of MTG design history.

You may be thinking of the different border on cards from the alpha and beta sets as variants. But that's the way every card was printed back then.

M:TG wasn't immune to the collectibles glut in the 90s. The Fallen Empires set, which came out in 1994, was so overproduced that you can still get factory sealed booster packs for the same price as current expansions.

In fairness, only Hymn to Tourach was really any good long term from Fallen Empires.

Limited editions of video games seem to do decent. Many runs sell out and then buying them on amazon costs 2 to 3x the price of the limited edition originally. It is extremely rare for such an item to go much above that these days, compared to some games from the past where a new copy is 10x the price or more, but it is still enough to count as collectible.

But is some limited edition swag gonna be worth 20x in a few decades? I think not.

You are confusing terms. "Collectible" doesn't imply that something will gain or hold value.

I still have my 90s Pokemon cards. Haven't found any that are really worth anything.

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