Haha I didnt take it that way. I was really just stating my opinion just because people are now talking about FS cards and Ive always liked a lot of them and for some reason FS gets lumped in with actual stinkers like AR and BS
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Wait, BS and AR are stinkers? News to me
Idk, Ive heard it said before that they are bad sets and they are always the most heavily discounted on Trollandtoad. BS has tyranitar which is epic but besides that not much, and astral is ok if you like the fusion forms I guess
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Ohhhhhh, BS is Battle Styles? I thought that you were suggesting Brilliant Stars was a stinker.
I thought the same thing haha. Yeah battle styles was meh, thought you meant Brilliant Stars and I was like howwwwww lol.
Anyways, if you love PLA and the Hisuian region, Astral Radiance is awesome! Iām fond of it myself, but yet Iām not into modern like that so I havenāt collected any of it. Maybe someday
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yeah battle styles is what I meant. Though I do think even the worst alt art set is better than the best non alt art swsh set. Maybe an unpopular opinion there but a single huge chase card has proven to be important for longevity
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I agree the eevee heroes gym set box is unbelievable beautiful in itself. I bought two of them, one to keep & one to openā¦ but there were so beautiful that i finally decided to keep them sealed and instead bought two espeon promos.
There are those products that have amazing content, and this box falls into this category.
Both espeon & umbreon card tells a story tgat make them unique.
And letās not forget leafeon vmax , this card is outstanding, my second bestā¦ they all come with an incredible set upā¦ my hat to the creative directors & artists behind those cards.
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For me, this is the best eeveelutiion alt art.
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you are right, in addition of espeon there is also this outstanding Gengar vmax alt artā¦ amazing art.
I think thereās a nice little economics lesson hidden in all this. Itās not my specialty so maybe Iām not the best person to explain it but I can make an attempt.
Hereās a thread right when the price started climbing.
There was a bit of talk about price manipulation back then too. I donāt know if you can conclude either way based on this data. But the interesting thing is that this is the ultimate result you can expect of an attempted price manipulation.
Prices are what they are for a reason. Itās an equilibrium between supply and demand, if you attempt to disrupt that equilibrium, the market will always return to the equilibrium unless there is a true change to either supply or demand.
replotting of the original data - price over time, black line is a mean rolling average
The more interesting thing to me over the actual price trend is the number of sales over time. You can visually notice that the density of points goes up with the price. To quantify this, see the plot below:
This takes the average number of sales for the previous 7-day span. Meaning November 7th shows the average number of sales per day from Nov 1-7.
Itās clear from the trend that there is a reaction happening to the price. I want to call this the FOMO curve, going back to the idea from the post I linked above. Let me overlay the two plots above:
You can see the lagging reaction of sale quantity to the price (partially because of the way I averaged the number of sales but also a real effect). Thereās a contradiction happening because as the price rises, more people start buying at the higher prices. Thatās the FOMO aspect, the lagging realization that prices are climbing and then many people deciding they either need to lock in a price or get on the rocketship.
The peak number of sales happens sometime in the middle of the price falling back to equilibrium (the blue line is shifted slightly to the right because of the way I averaged). No doubt this volume helps contribute to the quick return to the equilibrium. The number of sales returns back to ānormalā too, lagging behind the price, now the the hype has died down.
The piece of data Iām missing is the actual quantity available across time (ex. new ebay listings). I bet it would also show a similar trend, lagging prices but slightly ahead the FOMO curve. I think that would really explain the overall trend. I can imagine that as soon at that price is hitting 1.2k, youāre getting a ton of new listings posted that eventually start to undercut each other and thatās what really drives down the price.
Anyway, itās a very interesting case study. A great example why temporary hype or āmanipulationā never really matters unless the fundamentals of either supply or demand has changed.
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Great analysis, @pfm!
As you stated, price hiking happens when supply is limited and FOMO kicks in. Additional supply (a latency period of about 3 weeks in this case) kills the trend with undercutting.
A similar point was raised by AlphaHoarder on YouTube when he attempted a large buyout of old MTG cards. Originally, the price hiked quite a lot. But after the large stores and āinvestorsā saw this movement, they unloaded their heavy bags and drove the price right back down to normal levels.
If you look at the sales data by day of the week, Saturday and Sunday sales almost always drove the price for the following week. This is because auction houses (large eBay sellers, PWCC) ended their auctions on the weekend, often selling multiple copies of the card. This large supply (i.e., in November and December) allowed the price to return quickly to its destined floor.
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Wow. This is a very nice and in depth analysis. Thank you for all this effort. I really appreciate that.
In regard to the manipulation argument. It would be very interesting to see if other Alt arts or modern Eeveelutions spiked and retraced in a similar manner. This could indicate how likely a manipulation was.
It is hard to say what is genuine hype v.s. manipulation. Raw sales of the Evolving Skies Alt Arts saw massive spikes too, and have retraced slightly over November and December.
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True. Itās definitely hard to tell what drove the price up in the end. But I think if a whole portion of the market reacted the same way, FOMO would be far more likely due to the sheer scale.
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I think the problem is that stochastic hype and true attempted manipulation will look identical based on the summarized data. I guess the primary difference is if a small number of buyers are intentionally responsible for the initial price hike (then it would be some kind of attempted manipulation)
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Isnt it super easy ? Like if a card had a stable price and suddenly spikes with no reason?
Guess its easier to catch in older products since thereās a price history. In modern its easier to āmixā manipulation with price hikes since thereās not much price history.
It is surprisingly difficult to differentiate hype and manipulation. As @pfm noted above, they look identical from a data perspective.
What you would need is sales records (i.e., is one buyer/group of buyers buying the available supply?) and bid histories (i.e., is shill bidding taking place?). Only then can you know for certain that bad actors were manipulating prices.
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I think itās more of a matter of influencer hype as opposed to outright market manipulation ā Youtubers/IGers/Twitchers/Whatnoters (ew), in their never-ending search for content, end up creating the FOMO echo chambers that drives these prices parabolic
Maybe one day iāll be able to afford this beauty.
I agree that this was likely driven by influencers. Influencer hype tends to increase interest in two opposing parties:
- Those who are interested in making money (i.e., speculators: likely to sell)
- Those who actually enjoy the card (i.e., collectors/players: likely to hold)
The problem with these ultramodern bubbles is that the collectors/players almost always get burned. Either they lose money because they purchased the card at inflated levels, or they are priced out of purchasing the card that they deeply want.
When even I begin to feel FOMO, I know that something odd is happening.
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