For anyone wondering if I actually believe this conspiracy…
Obviously not lol. I just catch videos of various Poketubers (or whatever you’d like to call them) and there’s a common trend in a certain person’s videos. Constantly bringing up this “vintage cabal”. So I figured some insane crap must have went down either on here or Reddit or wherever involving this person and e4 members. I guess I wasn’t around to see the drama and was curious about what actually happened and why this conspiracy is being spewed.
No, there obviously isn’t a cabal of people scheming behind the scenes to tear down modern. That being said, the main point of this thread is actually pretty interesting: why do people believe that’s the case?
The lack of critical thinking in certain corners of reddit, facebook, instagram, etc. lends itself to conspiracy theories arising. This isn’t new. From “PSA grades harsher now” to “pop control” and “factory thefts killed my pull rates” and “scalpers got all the Van Gogh Pikas,” there’s always a flavor of the month theory that moves around. What a lot of these have in common is that they are started with limited, anecdotal evidence that then goes viral and becomes accepted as common knowledge. The ones that really stick around do so because they have something in common: they allow people to blame easily denouncable, shadowy figures instead of engaging with the tough realities of collecting.
I’m not bad at pregrading cards and need to work on my skills, PSA just got harsher at grading.
I didn’t get unlucky and not pull the card I wanted, I got screwed by TPCi.
Van Gogh sold out in seconds because of dirty scalpers, not because of massive demand from organic collectors just like me.
The “vintage cabal” conspiracy ticks all the boxes. Anecdotal evidence is easy to come by: not hard to find some screenshots of people talking up vintage, talking down modern, and spread it around. I’ve seen it! Blaming the “vintage cabal” for trying to keep modern prices down is much easier than acknowledging that there may be real problematic factors within the modern market that will limit its long-term success. If you point out these factors, you’re not well-informed, you’re a “modern hater.”
What’s especially confusing about this conspiracy is, as you note, that modern hasn’t actually been going down. Most SM-on modern has performed quite well since release. However, a key feature of all conspiracy theories is that they will spin contradictory evidence to support the theory. So modern is succeeding in spite of the efforts from the vintage cabal to take it down. When modern goes up, that’s proof that the modern-appreciating people are more powerful than the “cabal.” When modern goes down, the people “can’t give in” to the “manipulation” from the cabal, and need to HODL–those Obsidian Flames boxes will go up soon!
As with all conspiracy theories, there’s a small grain of truth in there. Most serious collectors are quite skeptical of the long-term investment performance of modern cards and product, for a wide variety of reasons I won’t list here. Sometimes that skepticism turns to derision and mocking of people who are seemingly all-in on modern. The “Target shelf” meme has been pretty prevalent here since 2020. Go on reddit/facebook, and I’m sure you’ll find people posting their “investments” which are just a collection of readily available, mass produced, sealed retail products from the past 2 years. Going back to the point about anecdotal evidence, you grab a few of these mocking statements, and there’s your “cabal.”
it seems natural that there would be a general sense of competition between “what is better” for different eras/ categories of things people like. I also think a lot of people have very strong emotions about this hobby which can manifest in really nasty, provocative behaviour.
Recently, I had to come to terms with the fact that one of my favourite Pokemon youtubers was engaging in such behaviours, which was pretty lame.
I guess sometimes people just get really loud and agitated about this stuff. Have to keep in mind that most of these people make content and thrive off interaction-- so generating drama is a part of the whole shtick. It may not necessarily be an accurate representation of how they truly feel.
The thing that always gives me a good laugh is that e4 is usually the boogieman. We are the echochamber cabal that hates modern!
It’s just 1 channel that likes to pretend he’s some sort of hated martyr of the Modern Pokemon Investing Community. The same guy pretends that modern investing content was nowhere on youtube in 2021, despite the fact that if you spent more than 12 seconds on youtube in that era you couldn’t move without being sucked into the vortex made by 1000 open mouthed youtubers exclaiming that shiny fates was impossible to buy and would go to $200
He can’t go one video without mentioning the word “cabal”. He starts every video with “FOLKS!” just like rudy. Then ends every video saying he is banned from efour by the vintage cabal.
I think e4 collectively has more modern than most of reddit stonk groups. It’s just not ride or die modern here. I know I personally have a decent percentage of my collection as modern, I’m sure it’s the same for 90% of e4
Well, the Meowth’s out of the bag. I wasn’t going to namedrop, but yeah. I kept hearing this crap about a cabal and finally decided to ask what in the hell he was talking about. I wasn’t around for the apparent drama.
I see. Just a guy trying to fill a niche I suppose. Good luck to him - I couldn’t stand much longer than 15 seconds of his channel intro video, but I am sure the young people love him.
