Largest card grading service halts submissions | Hacker News Reader

Largest card grading service halts submissions

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This whole collector mania is hurting one of my hobbies. Namely the Legacy format in Magic: The Gathering. So the idea for this format is that all the different sets of MTG cards are legal, though some specific cards are banned. Well back in the 90s Wizards made a promise to early collectors they would not reprint certain cards, creating what is now known as the Reserved List. Unfortunately for Legacy, pretty much every Legacy deck requires at least some of these Reserved List cards. For most of the formats history, this was expensive, but manageable. However now the value of many of these format staples has shot through the roof, putting it out of the financial reach of a huge selection of the player base when it was already considered to be expensive.

Have you looked into Pioneer? It's my new favorite formate by far. It avoids much of the degenerate combos that exist in legacy and even modern, yet has some crazy amount of depth. But most importantly, NO FETCHLANDS! You don't realize how much time and energy every deck constantly fetching takes up until you play without them.

Unfortunately I enjoy the degenerate combos and brainstorm shenanigans to much to let them go.

Since you're interested in playing, not collecting, is there a reason you can't just use proxies?

Stores can choose to allow proxies, but they are incentivized by Wizards to run a certain number of sanctioned events and report attendance, and events that allow proxies can't be sanctioned. People will play with proxies for testing purposes, but for Friday Night Magic you are expected to have legitimate cards.

Sounds like the problem isn't collectors so much as whatever incentives Wizards is setting up, then (along with Wizards's refusal to reprint the cards).

Perhaps I'm just uninformed about the business model of trading card games like MTG, but don't they need to set these rules for game stores to incentivize players to actually buy real cards to play with? Sure, not every player participates in tournaments like these, but I imagine there is a non-negligible amount of money spent by dedicated players who want to keep up with the competition when new cards release.

A small loophole, language doesn't count so you can sometimes find cheaper foreign cards online. That's modern more than legacy though.

screw proxies, just buy Chinese reprints.

For the purpose of playing the game, as opposed to collecting, why is it not possible to simply print a copy of the card, and play using it?

If it’s a legal/copyright issue, couldn’t you arrange to ‘rent’ this card for the duration of the game, or for inclusion in your deck from an owner / collector.

It seems ridiculous, as you mentioned, that playing the game is hampered, or not possible, due to the collectible nature of the playing cards.

The problem is playing in WOTC sanctioned events which do not allow for proxies. I can get why they want to do this, the whole point of these events is to sell more cards.

However there is a gameplay advantage as well. The high price of cards keeps players more stable and invested in their decks. You don't see players constantly running whole new decks, and sometimes people get creative due to financial or card availability constraints.

I was a part of a weekly legacy group that ran with a house rule of 10 proxies allowed. This hit a nice compromise between people being able to play decent decks while still having some kind of stability in the local meta.

So what you’re saying is I probably should go dig out the boxes of MTG cards I have from being a kid in the mid-90s? I haven’t thought about those in decades!

Not only that, but inventory the stuff genuinely valuable.

Because if you want it covered by your homeowner's or renter's insurance policy, you're going to need a rider on your policy for them, because homeowner's and renter's insurance policies tend to exclude valuable collectibles by default.

My M:tG collection isn't too crazy, but it does include 6 of the Power 9 (which I still play in decks), and my renter's insurance company has sent out an appraiser to verify the inventory so we could have a rider to cover it. They're worth as much as a pretty decent car.

The video games are getting to the point where they're probably next.

Sure, but be aware it depends heavily on the set. If they are from Revised edition or earlier they could be worth a lot, after that and the odds of a high valued cards goes down considerably. I started with Ice Age and didn't have anything valuable when I went through for instance.

If you haven't checked recently (within the last year) it might be worth it to check again, I started playing at around the same time as you so I have noticed that some cards, even from sets that were "overprinted" like Ice Age, have shot up in value considerably. You can check dawnglare to get an idea of what things are like now (https://mtg.dawnglare.com/?p=viz).

Most revised cards are almost worthless. Dual lands and Wheel of Fortune are the exception.

I came here to ruin your life and introduce you to Oldschool 93/94. The community is really awesome but at what price? :)

There are business niches everywhere – I should stop being surprised when one becomes visible.

> But the [sports/trading/collectible] card boom had made the current growth unsustainable. PSA was receiving 500,000 cards every five days, which was more than the company took in every three months before the COVID-19 pandemic started. The number of packages received per month rose from under 18,000 this past November to nearly 30,000 in February, and it eventually caused the system to buckle. In its statement, PSA said the company had grown from 421 employees in January 2020 to 783 this March, still not nearly enough for the surge that has happened over the past 12 months.

If this isn't a sign of a super-frothy market top, I don't know what is.

There's too much capital chasing too few investment opportunities.

It may also be a sign of people stuck at home going through their stuff and trying to find things to do with their time. It may be a sign of baseball fans not being able to go to games (or being scared of it, if they are able) spending their game ticket money on other fun baseball related activities.

Yes. So much money going into this crap, while actually making real stuff is in decline in the US.

Someone mentioned "The Days of Perky Pat", by Phillip K. Dick, mostly known for "Blade Runner". I found and read that. It's relevant.

it's weird - collectible markets in everything are getting bubbly. some things even mass produced pocket knives that got discontinued a few years ago are going for exorbitant prices.

it's like the internet/social media is creating some mass hysteria FOMO in everything.

Well, with cards in particular there was a big fad that went through the largest streamers a couple months ago. They discovered that opening $40k Pokemon boxes hoping for holos was an easy way to get massive views. Then that morphed into edge lord / troll style content of destroying super rare cards. That second part leaves a dirty taste in my mouth as these are insanely wealthy 20 something kids essentially bragging about how they can flippantly destroy something other enthusiasts would be thrilled to even just see at a convention, let alone own.

People were flipping cotton candy grapes. It's insane.

Man, I’ve been trying to get these for a couple of years!

Is this a joke I'm not getting? They're available at Safeways.

No legit, unless you live near the farms, these things sell out first thing in the morning when the stores open. I was seeing them show up on FB marketplace later that day.

Not here in Seattle.

I wonder if anyone saved their Beanie Baby collection from the last crash.

A good point, I should really dig those out with their clear tag protectors and everything. Are eBay sales on fire again?

Markets are obviously insane right now but that doesn't mean that the people in the market are irrational.

This bubble is going to pop with a devaluation of the dollar or a devaluation of everything else. But just because we are in a speculative mania does not mean that the price of assets is going to go down moving forward denominated in dollars. It is very possible the people shoving their money into baseball cards look like geniuses 5 years from now if the alternative was holding cash or having zero diversification.

> This bubble is going to pop with a devaluation of the dollar or a devaluation of everything else.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that the dollar is suddenly going to lose a ton of value. People have been calling for this since the beginning of time, just like the people who keep trying to short the S&P 500. It's not gonna happen, certainly not any time soon.

If it did, however, assets would moon as literally anything other than cash is inflation-proof. Moon in units, but remain likely quite constant in value.

You might find this interesting

https://inflationchart.com/spx-in-m1

It basically shows the value of the S&P 500 as a function of total cash in the system.

If you look at a graph of either our money supply or spending it is pretty clear that we are in uncharted territory in terms of money supply expansion. They are basically hockey sticking.

So don't make it out to be some kind of fringe hypothesis to expect inflation. It's the base case at this point.

For the record I'm specifically not arguing we will have hyperinflation. I don't think we will. We don't even need to get within 1/10th of hyperinflation to inflate away our current stock market bubble or even the crypto bubble.

> So don't make it out to be some kind of fringe hypothesis to expect inflation. It's the base case at this point.

I don't think it's a fringe hypothesis, I just don't think it's a foregone conclusion by any stretch. I don't think the folks espousing the idea have any basis either.

> They are basically hockey sticking.

You're only looking at half the equation - inflation is a function of supply and velocity. The fed has tools to adjust the supply to match velocity and it has successfully done so for 50 years.

The high asset prices (and crypto prices) are IMO more a function of supply. That doesn't mean inflation. Inflation is measured against the CPI basket -- not against he S&P.

Simply having more supply doesn't imply inflation, or even 1/10th of hyperinflation. It just indicates the supply is high. When combined with measured inflation, it also implies the velocity is low. Were velocity to increase, the Fed can contract the supply by increasing the reserve limit, selling back bonds to unwind its balance sheet and raising interest rates.

Speaking of high asset prices, you might find this twitter thread suggesting that the Dutch tulip bubble was actually caused by an oversupply of currency [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1382159296172015616?s=20

I'm aware of velocity. The government didn't hand out trillions in transfer payments during the last 10 years of money growth so I think the velocity side is covered as well.

The popular wisdom regarding the tulip affair is widely acknowledged to be BS and it is played out regardless, So I'd recommend to pick a more interesting anecdote if you want to make a point regarding economics.

On the other hand I have absolutely no doubt that asset bubbles can be inflated by printing money and you are misunderstanding my point if you think I'm insinuating otherwise.

Prices have been steadily rising on MTG cards for several years.

It was hard to find a loser in the past 2-4 years if all you did was buy boxes and sell them a year or two later. People are looking for anything that holds value to put their fiat in.

I've wondered about the asymmetry of information someone finding a bunch of cards in the garage. Maybe worth a lot, but would cost a lot just to find out. A collector could just bid on bulk cards, but how would they know it's not picked clean of the good ones?

So is the value essentially zero?

> A collector could just bid on bulk cards, but how would they know it's not picked clean of the good ones?

Lots of trust. A good collector will glance through it and determine if it's something they want to take on. Those bulk sets are usually sold cheap enough that it's worth the risk.

I've sold a few sets and made clear each time that I'd an eBay seller and glanced through them but didn't have time to really dig in.

If you're just blinding buying lots online though you're gonna get screwed.

To describe a microcosm of this line of thinking, let’s take Pokémon cards. Packs containing a (foil/holo) card weigh more. A sealed box of packs is theoretically a gold mine. But how do you establish that the presealed box wasn’t raided and resealed? A whole system of trusty discoverers and buyers play hand in hand.

Individual packs will always be looked at with doubt, since they’ve probably been weighed and sorted.

It occurs to me that the big thing here is not collecting or collectibles, but the ability to place a largely risk free side bet on an inventory that is otherwise just sitting idle in peoples attics. They've created no more cards, but have figured out how to regularize grading -- and hence pricing -- for a fee. They may also have a massive first mover advantage.

Ironically they are making tokens fungible.

Not into the card world at all, but I recently watched a baseball card investor / dealer’s explanation on YouTube... pretty interesting: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLroSNu2WrMA9eUAXrbWIhyAQ7...

I submitted two unopened packs of Garbage Pail Kids from a special set for Universal Monsters (by Super7) to PSA several months ago. I was starting to wonder what happened to them after I started doing GPK inventory in the last couple of weeks. This explains why.

how hard is it to make fake cards that pass psa grading ?

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