Thanks for nothing to all the investment bros on reddit who whined about how it was "too easy" to get the good pulls in last year's sets.
Doesn't help that TCGPlayer sellers have been up to their old nonsense to inflate Iron Leaves, Raging Bolt and Walking Wake's SIRs this weekend.
You're only half right. If you check the sales history, it is legit that people are buying the card. They just bought it at a faster rate than it was being listed, hence it results in no copies being available. You act as though that can never happen.
Where the dodgy stuff comes in, is after all copies are gone. Of course a seller can set any price, but there is a registered sale for $247.99. No one is that stupid. But it seems to be really easy to fake sales on TCGPlayer. Evidence being of the multiple times I've seen bulk cards costing cents have sales in the $100s of dollars. Those get reported and taken down eventually because it's easy to tell, but for rarer cards, how do you 'prove'?
There is a flaw in their programming that allows these non-sales to be reflected into the market price without the sale actually going through. Of course they are not transparent and have no incentive to fix it given that higher prices equal higher commission.
Pokebeach or Rattle, if he's not been sued to closure, should investigate it. Would be a big story considering TCGPlayer is the default site for TCG sales.
Personally, I would like to see a paradigm shift from TPCI. I wanna see an EX per pack, I wanna see at least 10 illustration rares and special illustration rares per box, if not more. I want to be able to collect the cards I want, whilst having spares to sell or trade to actual players. I would love to be able to do this myself from opening packs; however, I stopped doing that. Boxes costs a lot, and I mean a LOT. You can't complete a set if that is your goal, even with an entire case.
TPCI should focus more on selling product rather than making it an investment (even if they don't aim to do that, they could entirely do so far the former).
You never even got a holo a pack back in Base Set. Where is this idea even coming from? With pull rates that high, you won't be selling any spares to anyone for any money. They would all be worthless. Even now, with their poor pull rates, most cards in a set are worth under $5. It doesn't even make sense considering it's not easy to pull.
The difference is that then, most people would have been buying single packs whereas now, everyone seems to be a degenerate buying boxes or cases. Would TPCI make more money selling 2 boxes to each person or do whatever it is they are doing now?
I don't know if you're a player (cheapest TCG to play seriously) or a collector, but the hard truth is that most people don't seem to collect to complete sets. Most don't seem to care to collect most Pokemon. If they did, the cards today wouldn't be so cheap. And given that they had record sales numbers during the worst ever era of pull rates, why do you think they would change?
There is having a reasonable discussion on what they can improve and then there is fantasy.
