For a certain “modern” “singles” I’m gonna strongly agree on this one as there are two systems in Japan that can be gamed easily to create speculative bubbles.
The first system is the combination of buyback lists and mystery packs, which are both common practices in Japanese card shops. In Japan, shops often post their buyback lists specifying key cards and their offers on Twitter like this post:
https://twitter.com/magi_Akiba/status/1637660031809372160
Most shops also sells custom mystery packs which ranges from a few bucks to hundreds or even thousands:
The problem with these is that shops can adjust the buyback prices to make the top prizes of their mystery packs seemed more attracting. Customers might see their buyback list and think “hey, if I won this card from a mystery pack, I can immediately sell the card off at this decent price!”, while in reality this is not going to be the case as the cards pulled will most likely be damaged and not worthy of the full buyback price. However, such buyback lists were often retweeted as “proof” of the card’s market value, creating speculations.
The second system is Mercari. Mercari has a very loose policy of cancelling transactions - either the seller or buyer can initiate a cancellation, and once done neither side can leave feedback to the other (note that you can’t leave feedback in advance either - feedbacks are done in the transaction completing stage), and penalties are seldom given and not revealed. This creates a chance for speculation groups to do their work, as they just have to create listings of their target card with speculated prices, buy each other out and then cancel the transactions. Most people wouldn’t notice that it’s all the same group of people as Mercari doesn’t display buyers on listings, nor do they have filters to filter out incompleted listings. Listings will just sit in search results with the sold tag and their listed price, tricking people into thinking that the card is going up. What’s worse is that listings can be deleted by sellers at any time after transaction, so speculators can also clean up their traces once they’re done with their business.
For the Mercari case, we have already seen several singles getting speculated because there were a wave of listings sold at very high prices over a few hours:
- Clefairy (CHR layout, Dream League box purchase promo) during the $30 to $100 hike
- Miriam SAR from $500 to $800
- Eevee (SV Classroom Promo) from $150 to $300
- Miraidon AR (Sealed game prize) also doubled
Also, I don’t agree that printing more would resolve the situation we’re in. Consider the following scenario:
- More cards were produced with minor flaws such as print lines, etch pattern shifting, etc. - these flaws are actually becoming more and more obvious since Star Birth
- Card shops offering more for “Mint” (Black Label-equivalent flawless) cards
- Speculators using new offers to mislead people that the cards now worth more
- More people joined the great search, and started to demand more supplies (back to 1.)
Therefore, I would consider misleading information and system loopholes to be more of an issue than supplies in the current situation.