Man finds $1M worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster
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Born too late to get into a gun fight with striking steel workers on behalf of two guys who ended up building libraries, born just in time to chase down ill gotten Magic cards. Goodness.
It was a Gizmodo editor who paid $5,000 to buy the prototype after he basically knew it was stolen property. Apple reported it and the police got a warrant because knowingly buying stolen property for $5,000 is indeed a crime.
Gizmodo also got in contact with Apple and said they'd only return the phone (which they knew was stolen at that point) if Apple agreed to a list of terms. If you withhold someone's stolen property and refuse to give it back until they cave to your demands, the law is going to get involved. Again the warrant/seizure was overkill, but Gizmodo was doing some stupid stuff.
There were a lot of sketchy details about how the original guy got the phone. IIRC he tried to claim it was a mistake and that he tried to return it once he realized he grabbed the wrong phone, but he also made no effort to actually get it back to the bar. The panicked Apple engineer was calling the bar frantically to get it back. If he had made any effort at all to return the phone instead of selling it, it would have gone right back to the engineer.
The Gizmodo reporting also had other controversies. They were milking the situation for all they could, including basically identifying the poor Apple engineer who lost the phone. Really not cool. A lot of people hated Gizmodo for the way they treated the Apple engineer while they were trying to milk that story.
EDIT: Found it https://gizmodo.com/how-apple-lost-the-iphone-4-5520438
Notice how they open with the Apple engineer's name and personal info. They tell a story that tries to make the person who had the phone sound innocent, but it also involves him going through the Facebook account on the phone and then taking it home instead of giving it to the bar staff.
Then no details about how suddenly Gizmodo came to possess it for $5,000
> they'd only return the phone (which they knew was stolen at that point) if Apple agreed to a list of terms
so it's wrong to give a T&C to a company that gives T&C to its users? You can't see the irony in this? or you are okay with it? Did apple have to wait in line just like everyone else who reports property crime to (presumably) Cupertino PD? I think not.
The phone belonged to Apple. The phone was stolen (illegal). The stolen phone was then knowingly purchased as stolen property (illegal), and then the reporter demanded payment for the stolen property (once more, illegal).
What? The person had stolen property in their possession. They weren't in a position to be dictating terms of the deal because they legally did not have the right to possess the property, which they were fully aware was not owned by the person they bought it from.
From your article: "It was the last time he ever saw the phone, right before he abandoned it on bar stool, leaving to go home."
Sounds like a clear cut case of theft to me. Absolutely
Found in a dumpster in a shopping center that wasn't near the printing center, as part of a security breach involving a contractor, which the seller dutifully filed formal reports for?
And he found a second batch of these same sheets?
There are so many weird things going on in this story. Nobody has spoken up about them being counterfeit yet, other than the unclear warnings about them being in poor quality and refunding all of people's money when they complain.
Who knows, but counterfeit sheets being sold as new to collectors who want to believe they didn't just waste $1000 sounds like a real possibility.
I just looked at Cabbage Patch dolls on eBay. The bottom has finally fallen out of that market. Used to see asking prices over $1000. Now they're all around $25.
Yes, culturally not as relevant but gameplay wise it is very fun. The current structure decks on offer are great if you have a shop nearby or a friend to play with. Though depending on where you quit, you'd have to get used to a vastly different speed and complexity of gameplay.
This adds even more complexity with the upside of preventing players from playing solitaire on their own for 10 minutes before passing an unwinnable boardstate to you.
Also most floodgates that grind the game to a halt (Gozen,Vanity's emptyness etc) are either banned or limited.
I'd say the game overall is very fun nowadays, but the original "design space" is starting to hit a ceiling with absolutely bonkers effects being printed that literally cannot be one-upped with the current rules. Read the text of Forbidden Crown to get what I mean.
That doesn't seem like enforceable thing...
On a side note in 2003 I opened a pack and one of the cards was just a piece of cardstock probably they just ran a few sheets through in off-impression mode and forgot about them
It would be great if they created some cards like that on purpose but hidden features like fluorescent dyes, or dyes that develop over a year or two. So people throw out the blanks by mistake (until people know).
Especially if a pack always had a blank or two at deck ends for protecting end cards.
>Jedlicka says he posted the test print sheets online and Konami contacted him. The company wanted the sheets back. Konami runs the official Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments and angering them could mean hurting a brick and mortar business, no matter how rare and expensive a test print might be. “Once we confirmed in writing with [Konami] the blame isn’t put on us and that our status as an official tournament store won’t be affected we agreed to return them all,” Jedlicka said, adding that the whole thing was resolved without a major issue.
Sounds like the mistake happened more than once but not everyone was dumb enough to sell them under their own name.
Reminds me of how Black Vise and Demonic Tutor were handled before the introduction of different tournament modes like Legacy.
> Konami doesn’t have its own printers but instead contracts companies to print cards for it. One of those printers is Cartamundi, a Belgian company with a factory in Dallas. The seller’s mother’s scrapping business operates in a suburb of Dallas.
I trust this guy.
At the high level MTG is as much about rules lawyering as it is about actual skilled play, if you’re curious to learn more about this aspect of the game go learn about the 1997 pro tour with Mike Long, who infamously took the win by mind games and causing his opponent to concede when Long had no path to victory.
I'm a bit more familiar with rules lawyering mostly because incidents where people got wins from it are somewhat common topics that people would bring up for fun. Someone might play a Griselbrand deck, and someone else would ask if they knew about the Borborygmos incident that led to the rule where naming a card doesn't require literally knowing the exact name, etc.
I played Lorcana for a bit then realized you can get cards that look identical under a jewelers loupe for 1/10 of the price and I got out of it. A few months later the market price for all the cards cratered. I wonder why?
It must be possible to have flexible paper-like cards because my city has one-time tickets with NFC. Game would be nicer with card stock and not rigid plastic.
And would have to use fancy ones as cheap ones have no security
...well unless you run official tournament and want people to stop using fakes there but that's more a thing Games Workshop would do for miniatures.
The idea is more for collecters, get something hard to clone that supports public key crypto like the more recent NXT miifare cards. Program them with a unique number and key each and you could do remote verification that someone holds the card in question. Registries of card location etc. hell if you are clever you could invent a little database and state machine to load on the card to store it's values and logic in electronic access form.