Hm, since I knew about legitimate cards since my childhood, I´m drawn to legitimate cards ever since. A gold painted stone may look like gold but lacks every other feature gold has.
In the end, it´s also about showing respect to the original creator of something.
Well, nobody but you knew that it was a copy and nobody could ever find out!
Would you be ashamed to look at the art or design on your card?
Yes
What about this one?
Andy Warhol’s painting of the soup can is quite a bit more expensive than the actual “original” soup can.
Again, I’d say people desire a certain thing because other people want it, too. Obviously, rarity/scarcity are a catalyst for high prices after the initial demand has been established.
I think everyone who collected that card would buy all 50/100/1000 in a heartbeat, yes. You don’t know every owner of every trophy, because some if not most don’t care if other people know they have them. There’s no flex involved there whatsoever in my opinion, I don’t know what a “flex value” would be for a card that’s in a private collection, then sells on a public auction and then enters an anonymous collection again. In many cases it’s just people wanting the (real, actual) card.
@muk, Haha! Thats pretty good. In all seriousness, no one was collecting soup cans. The painting is the “original”.
If we want to avoid delving into essay-esque philosophical tangents and ramblings about biology and the human condition, this is the most accurate and concise answer one is going to get.
@muk I think a good comparison to that painting would be the recently released statues/charizards from daniel arsham. These are all pieces on their own as they reference the object but not try to replicate it in anyway, thus having all unique value.
In an American philosophy class I took in college, we discussed a very similar topic in relation to pragmatism. The discussion was on why the original Mona Lisa is much more valuable than an exact replica of it. Pragmatically, they should have the exact same value since they are materially equal and thus have the same artistic appeal. However, we as humans don’t always value things purely pragmatically. We give additional value to items based on certain intangible associations we make in our individual minds, be it certain memories, authenticity, historicity, or a desire for social status.
So, in the context of Pokemon cards, it makes sense why we value an authentic card over an exact proxy. We don’t associate the proxy with the other intangible reasons why we value Pokemon cards like, for example, the fact that it was pulled from a pack,or was a gift from a friend, or is a card we kept from our childhoods.
That’s great, “Showing respect to the original creator of something.”, I think there’s something there.
Do you think the artists feel the same way? When they see the art they got paid $100 for get printed millions of times and resold over and over for thousands of $ each?
@burnedos yeah I guess Im thinking of flex value a bit more loosely. You really dont think they look at their card and go “Wow, I cant believe there’s only 100 of these!! I’m so lucky to have one!”?
While yes they dont flex it, imo a lot of the $$$ value comes from the fact that they (or the future owner of the card) *could* flex it.
Also, for alla yall that just said “fake omg eww”, what do you think the reason is that so many people hang up a Van Gogh painting they bought at Bed Bath & Beyond and enjoy it in their house? Why dont the same thoughts that you have around “proxies” apply to those prints?
Why does someone want to own a PSA 10 vs. a PSA 9 when both cards are nearly identical to the casual observer?
Validation from yourself & others is a huge factor in owning things. You could call it “flexing”.
Counterfeits don’t have that same validation. If you wanted something simply for the visual appeal you could just print things out yourself, but that doesn’t bring the same sense of satisfaction, does it?
I sell a lot of my own artwork, and that artwork frequently gets stolen and reuploaded onto POD sites like Displate or Redbubble (my fault for not watermarking things properly in the early days). When I sell prints at conventions / shows, I offer to sign the front or back of the print to differentiate them from the ones you can buy online. Out of the 2000+ print sales I’ve done in person, there’s only 7~ people who have preferred no signature (I can’t recall for what reason, but that’s what my spreadsheet says). There is a very real desire to own the real thing, and to have the validation (in this case a signature) that it is real.
Well, I remember the texture and the smell of MTG and Pokemon packs in 1999 and call me a weirdo, but as I get older those two elements have a huge weight on why I prefer originals. They trigger some kind of pavlovian response in me that supersedes even the artwork, and can’t be reproduced through modern machinery.
Whenever I touch or smell original vintage cards it feels like travelling 20 years back in time to my local bookshop.
To that end, I would have zero attachment even to the original art store in a Pokemon vault you describe as it doesn’t evoke the same emotional or physical reaction.
I think this can boil down to what kind of collector you are. If you collect cards with nice art and you only appreciate the art on the card, maybe buying replicas will do the trick for you because you don’t care about anything outside of the artwork. I think we as collectors enjoy everything about the cards outside of their artwork too, like how they were released. Buying a replica to put in my collection would almost feel like cheating because other people had to put in the work to get the “authorized copy”. Every time I opened my binder to look at the card I would be reminded of that and I think a lot of others here would as well.
I have a Godzilla vs King Ghidorah poster on my wall. I love Godzilla and I like the art of the poster so I don’t mind not owning the original poster that was hung at a Japanese movie theater because my replica does the job it needs to do. Now if I collected original Japanese Godzilla posters that would be a different story and I would appreciate having an “authorized copy”.
Without another company, the artwork would´ve been never as popular as it is today. As I collect MTG art, I talked to many artists over the years. They really don´t care much about what the card depicting the artwork is selling for, they are much more interested how the collector community values the ACTUAL art they created. It means the world to them when they know that their art is cherished, be it through official prints, cards or in the original physical form. I´m all for giving the artists as much credit as possible as without them, all these games wouldn´t be the same.
I don’t think Pokémon is a public good that we are free to profit from (in the sense of creating new products, not investing). Selling proxies is just a lazy way to steal someone’s IP for a quick buck, and this takes money away from the people who are directly/indirectly involved with keeping Pokemon afloat. If we valued proxies similar to originals, then the originals would be worthless because an infinite number of proxies can be printed. And of course, I want the original/authentic/rare version of a card.
If someone has the talent to create identical copies of the cards, then they are welcome to start their own original card game.
Original products have a historic significance which replicas never will. That is to say original products are tied to a point or points on a timeline which replicas do not share.
@shadowless , youre right! Who’s to say that the Charizard card would have been any less popular had it not been credited, or even had a totally different artwork from someone else. A ton of the value is from Pokemon’s marketing so youre right it might be only minimally the artwork that makes the item desirable
@iisanaggie Mhm, I guess Im looking at it more from the lens of the consumer, not the counterfeiter or whatever. Why do WE value it less
I think for some people this is true but I don’t think so for a vast majority of people. There are so many silent collectors or people who collect cards that are practically worthless. I’m sure most of us here have cards in our collections that are only worth a few dollars. I think it’s just human nature to want to collect rare or limited items, precious metals and jewels have been hoarded and searched for probably almost as long as humans have been around. You can buy a diamond grown in a lab for half the price of a diamond formed by the earth, they’re identical but people want the natural legitimate version. There’s a story or history or a journey for those legitimate items whether you consider it or not. The only thing printing a proxy duplicates is the art, it doesn’t duplicate the pack that it was pulled out of or the tournament or illustration contest it was won from. And if you truly just love the art on a card and want to look at it then by all means print out the art and hang it on your wall, people do buy art prints and postcards for that exact reason.
Proxies are replicas that infringe on the intellectual property of the original card manufacturer. These guys should stop wasting everyone’s time (including their own) printing copies of other people’s hard work. The rewards would be better from developing their own TCG. If Flesh and Blood can do it, why not them?
A proxy in terms of the word is a substitute. Some may be completely happy with having a duplicate to the original, some not. I all comes down to the individuals perception of an item. I would say in some circumstances a single person would see some things as being ok and others not, so it’s not a black and white situation for all cases.
