IBTL
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@zorloth, 100%. Even as a kid I remember all the knock off’s that would last maybe a couple months. It really feels like the late 90s early 2000’s all over again. Except today you have a bunch of 20 somethings who speculate like crazy.
Demand vs speculation is so easy to identify these days. Pokemon couldn’t print enough product to meet demand in the past year. Then you have these start up “tcg’s” whose owners state they won’t release thousands of boxes of product, because they know it would bomb. Individual stores order more pokemon product than the entire set release of these new “tcg’s”. I can’t think of a better comparison of actual demand vs artificial scarcity.
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Not only do they know it would bomb, but they need to keep the people who are already engaged in their “tcg” still engaged. Like you said, they are only engaged because it’s a speculative moneymaking endeavor. Printing tons of cards and making things non-exclusive would destroy the small group of followers they already have because they wouldn’t be able to make money on the secondary market anymore. multi-level marketing has to constantly release 1/100, 1/1000 cards, special promos, unique variations, and purposeful “errors” in order to keep the moneymaking train going. Of course when every card is a 1/100 promo then they devalue themselves pretty quickly, but this is the corner which multi-level marketing has backed themselves into less than a year into existence.
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Actively planning to have three different first editions of your base set, the first being a trophy rarity unicorn with unique borders, is obviously sketchy even if it didn’t happen in the middle of a hyperinflated global pandemic, which it did.
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VSTAR is coming
The way I see it, there are three kinds of people interested in multi-level marketing:
- The smart ones who simply like it, and don’t care if it is a fad or whether it will make them rich.
- The gullible ones who think it is something more than a fad and believe it will make them rich.
- Theo other smart ones who know it is nothing more than a fad but perpetuate the myth so they can fleece the gullible ones.
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100%. A couple other equally significant factors:
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TCGPlayer is much bigger in MTG – pretty much everyone uses it. In Pokemon, it seems much less ubiquitous.
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Buylists are much bigger in MTG – as such, many people buy most of their cards with store credit (myself included). This happens directly via the stores’ websites, not on eBay.
I don’t even check eBay for MTG cards; I just buy from TCGPlayer, Facebook, CK, and ABUGames. Whereas for Pokemon, I buy 90% of my cards off of eBay.
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obviously this is incomplete data. it would be impossible to get a clear picture of sales across all mediums for all tcgs. I doubt we even have 20% of the full picture from distributors to the resale market for all tcgs and products related to them.
Just throwing in my 2 cents. Surprised the thread is still alive given how old it is and the topic.
Full context here as I did see the post originally over at the multi-level marketing discord on the 16th and it is weird to strip that away for the OP. Photo and the quoted text were posted in the MZ discord announcements.
The data is really interesting and leaving the announcement to line 1 would have been a good informative and interesting post. Line 2 just adds speculative unsubstantiated nonsense that seems to be an extreme reach. I quite highly doubt the average $ amount of MZ would have been 10x to overcome YGO but if it was then why not add another column detailing the gross $ amount sold to substantiate the claim.
In any case to me it shows something positive to have sold through more items than are actively listed. This is something you could replicate at various points over time and you could see trends of availability vs. how much is actually selling through. If month over month the amount of listings for any TCG continues to rise while sales continue to fall that would clearly demonstrate more people are looking to sell than buyers ready to pick it up at the current time. With multi-level marketing going into Wal-Mart next year with cryptid nation second edition it will be a true test of demand when product doesn’t just stonk to the moon and hopefully will stay available at MSRP.
I find it really interesting and funny that people think multi-level marketing was/is being artificially and intentionally made scarce in it’s early stages. This time 1 year ago the kickstarter didn’t sell out. I repeat, 2,500 boxes of kickstarter product wasn’t artificially low, the market literally didn’t want them all and they didn’t sell out at the original offered price of $50. 1st edition was printed to 10x that during a time where Pokemon is gobbling up printing capacity and raw materials are at all time highs due to COVID supply chain issues. Nightfall was printed another 1-2x that.
Just to find some more common ground with others in the earlier posts, I do agree it is a bit crazy how many limited promos there are. I can’t keep track of how many 1/1000 or less examples there are of promotional cards, but again multi-level marketing is quite tiny, what do you want them to do, print 2 million like there were for coro mew? Another knock against them I have seen is why are they putting it on everything? Playing cards, hats, shirts, pins, whatever the hell else they are doing… I mean Pokemon was on just about everything you could find and still is as it is just good marketing to have your brand out there on anything that the consumer will buy and in the discord there are genuinly a lot of people asking for these things.
@japanime I would say I am a hybrid of 1 and 3 on multi-level marketing very similar to my involvement in Pokemon. I genuinely enjoy interacting with the product (Pokemon at least 50x more for now though which will never be overcome by MZ as Pokemon has deep roots in my nostalgia) I think tons of the prices are absurd (yes I still think that for a lot of Pokemon even after many items fell 50-80% or more). I talk about the absurdity where I see it, I buy the value where I see it and I take some speculative risks with intent to profit similarly in both. I’ve made money at the hands of #2 in both as well.
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I agree but I do think there is artificial scarcity happening with some influence by the top level. You are right that no one wanted the kickstarter but no one wanted it because the product simply wasn’t good and in my opinion still isn’t good. The only thing that has changed from then until now is youtubers and influencers like mr. king pokemon over here saying it’s the next best thing. I don’t think people suddenly decided the cards were cool and collectible, that’s why it came out of nowhere with all of this unusual and artificial growth. You said that no one wanted it and there is a reason for that.
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The problem with making 100 per samples and 2500 true 1st ed kickstarter symbol boxes when you don’t know whether or not the “demand” you hope and plan for is going to multiply by a trillion over the next year is that your inability/unwillingness to reprint those (unlike regular 1st ed) make the initial effort seem like a complete cash grab.
I didn’t see the Kickstarter personally, not sure whether I would have went for it if I had honestly it is impossible to say in hindsight where my head would have been at the time on it all. If people think multi-level marketing is bad, it is a bit scary the trend it started with current kickstarters getting 10x funding at full blown current MZ prices 1 year later. MZ didn’t sell out at $50 per box and you’ve got kickstarters now getting overfunded at $1k per box lol. MZ isn’t starting on any IP but that is one thing I like about it a lot. It is dipping into well known public domain in the cryptids of which each has some existing appeal from the hundreds of people for very small regional ones to the hundreds of millions to billions of cryptids for the ubiquitous ones like Bigfoot.
It very well may all fizzle out. Even if it doesn’t fizzle out it has nearly 0 chance of becoming “the next Pokemon”. There is a lot of space in between though and I’m interested to see where it ends up. For now I have enjoyed opening the product thus far and participating in it through the early stages.
my advice for MZ would be the same as for Pokemon. Don’t “invest” (read:speculate) in it with any money you can’t afford to lose entirely. It is highly speculative and it is very possible to lose everything if it dies out entirely. Pokemon I guess has the luxury of limiting your speculative losses to maybe only 90% if you buy poorly at ill advised times like last October.
multi-level marketing can overtake pokemon and i still wouldnt care about it. Pokemon is better in every tangible way, just because some people want to throw buckets of money at eachother in exchange for newly printed highly speculative garbage doesnt mean anything. Sales volume, sold vs active %, you name the data, it doesnt mean anything. Even a base set energy is more exciting to me than a $10000 metahype 1/100 shiny fart token
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How did my Pokémon thread turn into a multi-level marketing thread? The whole purpose here was to show that Pokémon isn’t dying. I’ve been getting loads of messages from people fearing the worst often saying the Pokémon hobby was being destroyed from the inside out. In fact, two VERY big collectors here on E4 have offered me their whole collections. Even one of the top 5 collectors in the world, who’s one of the biggest here, is moving major stuff.
My graph hopefully shows that Pokémon is still healthy. Those numbers are still very impressive though they have been dropping. I’m sure Pokémon will survive this just like it’s survived all the other difficult times.
Ok then who?
Every 2 months there’s a thwarted astroturfing scheme or an opaque fundraiser but this time was somewhat more crafty than the rest. What surprises me is your response when call out your motives and how you think we don’t realize what you’re actually attempting here.
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You are well affiliated with multi-level marketing and then post a thread with barebones statistics that show that specific tcg being a close competitor to Pokemon, on a Pokemon forum, over every other popular TCG. And then, instead of elaborating on why you made the post and listed the statistics, you said
“What does this all mean? Well that answer is well above my pay grade (my degree was in BioChem). What do you all think?”
Yeah, you might have prefaced the statistics by saying that Pokemon’s leading the way but clearly no one here is buying what you’re selling based on the replies
Come on, King 
One of the consequences of selling your online influence to a company is that every single thing you post is going to be read with a veneer of bias whether intentional or not.
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Tbf this image was shared in the multi-level marketing server. It feels like pumping their tires, as the numbers aren’t surprising for pokemon. Either way I think most people are just discussing the topic.
As for the people selling, at this point I think everyone who enjoys pokemon just doesn’t care. Even if you or I sold everything, sure it would perhaps be sad, but people will carry on. We already had multiple E4 members sell out last year, and it was irrelevant to the overall market. Collectors just adapt to market conditions. For people who are fearful, it says more about them than anything else.
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