No one is being forced... We all know that. I understand Don and your point of view. Im not complaining, I'm just trying to explain why people get angry. Not everyone buys decks to use. I know that sounds strange. These promotions tug at the heart of collectors who "want" these rare/limited decks to be hard to obtain. TBC makes them easy to obtain. I know some of us say its not about value but value is all part of the collecting hobby. It has nothing to do with reselling them. Its knowing you own a valuable deck that makes collecting fun. The words "rare" and "limited" mean very little to those of us that have followed this industry the last few years. Its more about deck obtainability.
Well, if someone buys decks of playing cards they don't want or intend to use, they have a problem and should seek psychological help.
The collectors who complain the loudest are NOT the ones who want decks to be harder to obtain, just so they can try to have a monopoly on the market for this rare deck. It's the people who were so jazzed to get this deck, they went and spent more money than they should have buying an entire brick (or two or even three) to obtain it, and didn't bother to read (or chose to ignore) that the deck would be made available later for sale, making the purchase of all those extra unwanted decks unnecessary. They're fools for doing so. TBC wen't out of their way to make it clear that the white Nauticals would come up for sale in the future. They didn't say when, but what business wants to cling to inventory for any length of time? It costs money to warehouse products, it makes money to sell them.
There's no other way to put other than that these kids are being little brats and are unable to appreciate something good when they have it or to have the patience to read the fine print and take the advice it gives.
The other contingent, the ones I think you're talking about in this post I'm replying to, are not standard customers - they're speculators. They swoop in on a rare deck, buy up as many as they can and try selling them for a tidy profit on eBay. Again, these are fools who didn't bother with reading the whole page. Speculators are what makes the card collecting business so difficult for the collectors - they drive up market prices for no particular reason other than the desire to line their own pockets with more cash. They have little interest in collecting, insofar as they're more into making money off collectors. Well, speculating is a two--edged sword - anyone who didn't consider that this deck would be on the market in the not-too-distant future and shelled out money buying decks they don't want was risking their investment, as all speculators do. They often choose not to see it as risk - they want the sure thing, they want to control the market to make their goods more valuable and sell for more money.
Markets move in two directions - up AND down. It's the stupidest thing in the world to "invest" in a pack of playing cards, just like it was to invest in comic books, baseball trading cards, etc. For every guy holding a Honus Wagner, something that's worth serious coin under nearly any market conditions, there's millions others holding a ton of Joe Schlabotniks that aren't even worth the paper they were printed on. Playing cards don't have a true Honus Wagner yet, unless you're talking vintage and extremely rare - the kind of rare not likely to happen in your own lifetime, like the War Series decks from 1918. All this new stuff? It's "Death of Superman #1". I hear some collectors use those to line bird cages. There's plenty of rare decks out there, but rare is relative. How many people are actually even seeking out these rare decks? How many collectors are there in the world? I think to say there's a hundred thousand worldwide would be generous, especially if you're referring just to collectors of modern specialty decks, circa 2007 and later - or in other words, since the birth of Ellusionist and the Bicycle Black Tiger deck. Sure, of the six or seven billion people in the world, you have one of only 5,000 copies of Deck X. But the market of collectors as a whole is so small in comparison that at least one in twenty collectors also has a Deck X if not more. Rarity only counts in relation to the demand for the rare object itself - it can't create demand all by itself.
OK, now I'm into rant territory.
BTW: the comparison of a brick to a box of cereal wasn't meant to be taken so literally, but your financial comparison is faulty as it failed to take into account the cost of the toy. In this case, you have Nautical decks for $5 a piece and the rare white Nautical now selling for $10 - a brick of Nauticals would be $60, or a 6:1 ratio compared to the cost of the white deck. For that $3 box of cereal you're talking about, the toy inside, including the labor, shipping to the cereal factory, etc., can't be more than about 50¢. It's the same 6:1 ratio. Actually, that's generous, since the toy probably costs less than that even, and I know cereal where I live costs much more. But it was close enough for an analogy. If you want to get truly literal about the whole thing, replace "box of cereal" with "12-pack of soda" and put whatever collectible item you can think of in the box with the cans. Maybe even a deck of cards!
