I can easily picture such a scenario.
Some guys think, hey, there's a lot of action in this "rare" cards market. Lemme slap together some craptacular deck, call it rare 'cause I don't make an infinite amount of them and rake in the bucks.
Midway through the process, the market begins to wise up. Craptacular decks suddenly lose popularity. Even decent ones aren't selling out as fast as they once might have, decks from major sellers like Dan and Dave. They see that their craptacular deck is about to tank, big-time, and take their cash with it.
They think, hey, we gotta come up with a PLAN. What if we do this - we go ahead with our minimum-required print run of five thousand craptacular decks...we hold back some of them - we play with them, destroy them, use them as landfill, or just plain lie about how many decks were made in the first place and drop most of them in a hidey-hole somewhere. We take a fraction of the original print run, sell them as SUPER RARE, ULTRA RARE, (some other superlative) RARE on eBay with a super-jacked up price, maybe even shill-bid the first one or two to ridiculous heights in order to chum the waters for the hungry card collectors...
This is an artificial shortage, no matter how you look at it. USPC said runs shorter than 5K are the EXCEPTION, not the rule. They do such things for solid, regular, big-time customers. We're looking at a deck that's a complete unknown, but claims to have been printed in a run of under a thousand? And only five hundred will see the market? Why - is there some famous Native American magician using the rest in his lounge act at the casino on his native lands? In INDONESIA?
I don't even know why I'm wasting time even thinking about this deck, since I have no plans to buy it. Caveat emptor, folks.
