Yahoo Japan in 2025 reminds me so much of eBay when I joined in 2001. Just a wild west of no protection and made up seller rules lol
There have been a string of BGS trophies being sold by little no feedback sellers on Yahoo for the past few years. Many being no name trainers.
These cards have been apearing on Yahoo for almost a decade. They pop up a few times a year at random. Most people either don’t want to take the risk or never catch them in time. Auctions always end in a 3 days w/ 48 hrs to pay. So they usually sell way below market because of the hassle.
There’s always been these random chance encounter deals on yahoo. Like the Japanese E series samples from early 2010s & the proto birds that Linkdu acquired.
I feel these are less a random chance encounter, and very obviously employee extras as the 2000-2002 trophies are always no name, and they are all graded with bgs. They are also very frequently canceled when the seller doesn’t get a sale number they feel is high enough
I agree, they’re likely ex employees. But I don’t think these guys care about sale prices. I’ve bid on some of these before & had my bids canceled. Then they sell cheaper than what I bid. Plus they could get much higher sales just using middlemen like Proretrox.
I call them “random chance encounters” because of the infrequency in which they appear. They only appear a few times a year on random dates & you never know what card they’re gonna sell.
Are you bidding from a domestic account?
No, I was using Zenmarket at the time.
Thank you everyone for the thoughtful additions of information, such as reminding us of the rosette pattern, previous posts, and differences in printing methods. @HumanForScale Great work, continuing from PFMs thread and collating resources here.
My two cents: I’m sure many of us have dealt with cons. It’s often the case that those with greed and arrogant disregard are the most easily conned. Is that the case with CGC and Akabane? IDK. But we’re certainly seeing a lot of disregard in the responses to these recent card conflagrations. Evidence continues to mount.
Glad you mentioned this. Magic fakes have beem easily exposed using them. I’ve been reading this thread over the past few days and maybe this eluded me:
Is there a definitive rosette pattern? Or at least subset of them, or rules that indicate a proper one?
I understand the lack of them indicates a different type of printer(not always malicious for true old protoypes[i think]) but am wondering if sophisticated fakes of other cards can be determine a by a ‘false rosette’(that phrase sounds like it’d get u killed in 40k)
I’m not concerned about any of my cards but I find it super interesting
@HumanForScale had some great info but I’m wondering if there’s any more specifics
If someone knows better than me in these matters, please correct me.
Rosette patterns indicate the type of printing method used. IDK if it’s always the same, but I imagine it’s fairly consistent, since the size and shape of the dots determines the saturation, colors, and shapes in the image. @GhezziTCG demo’d this in his post, tho I’m not sure I’m interpreting it right. Number 1 Trainer trophy printed on "uncut sheet" appears to have been printed in 2024 - #44 by GhezziTCG
Also, the crispness of the edges is critical for text and black lines, since it cannot be replicated without a vector image (scalable digital document) and separate printing layers, as @HumanForScale showed earlier.
Interesting, thanks. I’ll have to do some further reading. As someone with a slightly above average of computer graphics and putting RGB pixels to pngs, CMYK and putting images on a magazine or playing card(for years at far finer resolution than screens, without today’s computer conveniences) is some black magic type stuff.
also the idea that colors can be printed but not accurately reproduced on a screen just doesn’t compute right with me. I get it, but also don’t.
There’s a lot of BIG words in there. We’re not but humble collectors.
kidding, mostly.
But it is odd, isn’t it, how images on paper don’t align with images on a screen. Scientists are quite clever.