The Question of the Day is a way to facilitate community discussion to help members ponder the unanswered questions of the world that are somehow relating to the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
Today’s Question: QotD: Used to be that you couldnt find a card because it wasnt worth grading, now you cant find a card because people are already hoarding them. Does it ever make you want to change goals?
Helpful Considerations: Limited release of 5k feels a lot more limited now. What about rare cards that you know are in someones permanent collection? What do you do?
With enough patience and perseverance, things may change. But when you are limited by what is available, you do what you can and you learn to accept that.
The other (maybe obvious) piece of insight is: money talks. If you truly want to achieve rarer, more expensive items, or items that are in someone’s collection and they never intended to sell, the only way to lure them out of the shadows is to pay for a super rod and hope for the best. Usually, this means starting to distill down your collection to the items you really can’t live without, selling the remainder, and having the cash on hand to get to harder to obtain items. It’s a tough decision to make, but is starting to become more and more necessary as the market continues to grow in nearly all directions.
Idk if I ever encountered this problem, since I usually collect set cards or decently available promos. It happened that cards weren’t available at the right price though, and in that case I usually chose to wait.
Sometimes the cards are out there, but still niche to grade: unfortunately I’m lazy and I never considered to source them raw & submit myself
Considering the QotD, hypothetically I would use every information from this forum. Asking people, starting a thread with a good finder fee, sending DM via socials. Where is a will, there’s a way (if there’s a budget too of course). Just expect it to not be easy, but potentially a lifetime challenge.
“I see now that the circumstances of one’s birth is irrelevant; it’s what you do with the gift of determination that decides if you’re a quitter and whether you find that card or not.”
-probably Mewtwo
Arse-licking, overpaying, networking, pandering to the idiosyncracies of all sorts of weird and wonderful characters, omit, manipulate, play dumb, play clever, be clever, cherry-pick information to construe advantageous arguments, all while exuding the both subtle and overwhelming sense of willpower that will convince your enemy to do what you want them to do.
…hypothetically. I only wheeler deal booster boxes in the past tense.
Ill keep my same goals, but I was talking with a friend about this, and he said “itll be ok, the market always works itself out”. I just dialed back a bit, and am focusing more on goals I want in life. Current one is a new career. Ill have all the cards I want, and hopefully theyll be cheaper pokemon goals, and if not then its fine. Pokemon cards will always exist while Im alive (probably), and completing a neverending collection will be just as exciting when I first started by the time I start taking it seriously again. Who knows maybe theyll be so elusive because no one wants them making it more fun to fuel . Ill always collect, but its definetely not as fun or easy, but getting caught up with the noise of the hobby isnt my style, so I wait patiently.
Maybe not exactly what the question is asking but I definitely find it a lot harder to collect NM raw cards for binder sets now because, with many cards, there are often more that have been graded than left raw. That can be frustrating, especially when less desirable grades still come with a premium over a raw simply because it is graded, regardless of the grade.
Sometimes leaves me wondering if most of the NM raw has been graded away or if it is simply in people’s collections for good. I suspect the former due to the covid era boom where everything was worth something and was sent off, and so much sealed vintage was also burnt through so that those cards could also be submitted and flipped.
Sorry for (probably) stating the obvious and also old news!
Mostly i just skip every new release that i suspect will be pricy, very few new cards that i actually need so i can just follow how the prices turn out being on cards i might be interested and then decide if i still want them
. Ill always collect, but its definetely not as fun or easy, but getting caught up with the noise of the hobby isnt my style, so I wait patiently.