It aint for the cards mate its for the cleanliness and immaculate look my binder has. I know it looks weird but it helped ease my anxiety and im happier now
I spoke to Arita about this and he’s pretty happy to meet fans and travel. He also knows that some people will sell cards and while he’d prefer they didn’t, he knows that once he charges his price its all out of his hands. He doesn’t like being tagged as a means of cards being sold and when it happens you’ll see him reply that he’d rather the owner keeps the item he signed for them. He has raised his prices and he’s very business savvy, adding signed original “prints” to his website so people won’t scalp it while also putting up lead times to auctions for original artworks he’s creating while on tour. He’s literally what I’d consider a “normie”. Super cool family man/businessman/ normal artist like I’ve interacted with in other fields such as comics and anime. When he signs at events I don’t think he phones it in. His art looks cool, he acknowledges people when they introduce themselves, he’s taken pictures with people plenty of times, he’s just a solid role-model kinda guy of how the experience should be.
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How much does it cost to have Arita sign a card now? Found this thread but the information seems a bit outdated.
I probably met her on 3 or 4 separate occasions (one time by pure luck since I didn’t know she was going to be there) but each time interacting with her was different. You could obviously tell she was burned out from going to events.
Even just watching her at one event, she doesn’t talk much to anyone or doesn’t respond to any compliments when I was watching in line. This could be a culture thing, or just her personality.
It was a tough pill to swallow at first knowing she doesn’t really care for Pokémon fans.
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Isn’t it wild that without any names being dropped my description immediately brought a specific artist to your mind?
Not a stellar reputation to be making for themselves. I hope whoever I’m talking about does some soul searching and learns how to find happiness & gratefulness with all of life’s opportunities and successes that other artists would die for.
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Thank you @mrbubbles and @chrispy for pointing out those details. I’ve tried to go through 3 of his signings in the past but they all cancelled so I wasn’t able to see first hand. Normally I would see his twitter page with reposts saying, “I drew this” which gave me a different impression. Glad I’m wrong though in this sense. I worried that all of the joy in this was gone for him so I’m relieved to hear that’s not the case. Thank you for correcting my perspective.
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I feel like alot of Arita’s posts may make it seem like he’s over the Pokemon side of things, but when he visited Australia it became clear that he really appreciates his fans, stayed behind both nights to push in as many signings as possible and even held a free event for children where he signed a card for each free of charge. That said, we didnt have any stalking incidents here ao I imagine he was in a good mood lol
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In toronto i think it was like $50-$100 depending on addons. In Germany last month it was maybe 45 euro for sig in english or 215 euro with sketch for a lot more liberties such as signings in Japanese, vertical, colors and whatnot. All of the artists are making their sig offerings more modular with addons which is a good business model.
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In Hawaii, this year, I believe Arita was charging around $250 for auto + Sketch combo.
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Meanwhile this other artist that won’t be named is STILL typing away complaining on social media nearly daily. They are literally devaluing their own brand/signature/sketches. I foresee a surprise Pikachu face when they eventually try to raise their prices to match Arita/Ariga/Literallyanyotherartist to find out that people are no longer interested.
Agree 100% and you make great points in this summary too.
I went to Le Gala TCG last year in Paris, France and Arita’s model over there worked flawlessly. He did 600 autographs over 2 days (300/day). Every collector there who got autographs from him was extremely satisfied. We also were assigned a timeslot for the autograph and the most that I waited for an autograph was 10 minutes in his model.
Overall incredible experience.
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I’ll just say it hits different when you see dozens and dozens of people who act excited in the moment only to see every card they got signed hit the market in one psa turnaround cycle.
It hits different when you have to tell 400 people they can’t get an autograph because multiple people with a stronger financial motivation paid for 5-6 people on TaskRabbit to wait in line for them.
It hits different when you see naive people donate slots to some Europeans because they felt bad about how long they had to travel only to see them listed on ebay a couple months later
Here’s a tough pill to swallow: maybe autograph events are so tightly controlled because 20% of the attendees will abuse every millimeter of good will offered to them.
It’s easy to think “this one weird trick fixes autographs” when you don’t have to manage with the restrictions and complications of actually doing the work.
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Artist selling directly is the one trick that works. If artists could sell directly, like they do in mtg and in most other hobbies or sports, it would resolve most-all these problems. No matter how well organized an event is, the core issue is Pokémon limiting artists.
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Most artists simply don’t want to do that. It was already tried and failed with significant relational costs, you know this.
Exactly! There are solutions to problems but Pokémon/artists don’t want to do them, and instead just blame flippers. Pokemon collectors live in a bubble sometimes and don’t realize signings have existed before pokemon was a thought in Tijiris mind. There is a reason these issues only exist in pokemon, and it’s not because of flippers.
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You both have a lot more experience than I do…but my two cents:
Using that sports example: It’d be great for someone like me who might not be able to attend an event to have that online/direct 2 consumer option. Even if pricing were higher…and sketches were more generic…I’d be interested in them. Mike trout was exclusive to MLAM and I bought tons of balls directly from them. It was easy, MLB authenticated and they got to set the price to match demand.
Pokemon and international shipping being the limiting factors in my eyes.
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The one thing I think consistently never gets through in this discussion is that signings have been done in the West. The default here is understanding autographs as a commoditization of a person. It’s not an inability of a Japanese artist to understand, you are literally dealing with completely different ways of thinking.
It’s the exact same way in the business world. America had “companies” (in the modern sense of the word) before Japan did. Japan developed an entirely different work culture. If you ran an American company and wanted to work with a Japanese company, you will have way better chance if you can manage the cultural differences.
In this context you are just saying “well, the Japanese run their companies wrong, we have been doing it for years before they did”. But this position makes a value judgement on what is simply a benign cultural difference and also pretty much guarantees that someone else will work with the company instead of you.
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Another point… we can say the end-goal could be direct-to-consumer but it takes a shit-ton of relationship building and good will to get to that place. It’s not something you can just go from A → B
And I agree it would solve a lot of problems.
The value judgement is made by the artists themselves complaining about people selling their autographs. If Japan/pokemon/artists don’t want to do something because of culture or whatever that’s their choice. It doesn’t negate the fact there is a solution, it’s just they don’t want to do it for whatever reason.
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