The Price of Collectability
Nothing excites my inner treasure goblin like a good old fashioned collectible trinket. It doesn't even have to be worth anything on the secondary market if one of the items in the set is something fun that I like, I will want one.
I just got an ad from McDonalds showcasing the latest Happy Meal landfill items. The set is random parts of a McDonalds restaurant. Some of them are fun like the tiny scale restaurant or the Happy Meal box, but some are total trash. If I was 6 years old and pulled a deep fryer out of my happy meal I'd be livid.
Of course on the 1st of July people will be lining up to get extra Happy Meals just to get a chance at that golden Happy Meal Box or the Boo Bucket. They do the same thing when it's Pokemon cards or special cups or the adult meal toys.
I remember when McDonalds did the mini Beanie Babies. I still have one or two. It was chaos back then, but I was in the 7th grade so it was just another fun thing my friends and I were into. I knew friends who had expensive beanie babies. The kind you kept in the acrylic boxes. You put the plastic protectors over the tags because that purple Princess Diana bear was gonna pay for your college one day. LOL.
As much as I like collectibles I'm not a "catch-em-all" type of collector. I would have enough money for one of something not a full set. So when we went to the mall I would comb through the bucket of beanie babies and get one that I thought was cool. I didn't put tag protectors on it, I wasn't going to put in on a shelf, I threw it around my room because I was like, 12.
Tamagotchis? I had one. It was teal with yellow buttons. I didn't need seven of them dangling on my mini backpack purse. Not just any backpack purse, but one of these bad boys:
Take notes, that's what we had as purses in the late 90's. Imagine that with a Tamagotchi dangling from it. I might have to get another one off Etsy or something, lol. But what else would be inside one of these bags? Why, none other than a transparent plastic tube filled with cardboard circles. Perhaps a metal or plastic circle to hit them with.
Boys didn't collect Beanie Babies or virtual pets, they collected Magic and Baseball cards. But everyone collected POGs. Every toy store carried them. Every other kiosk in the mall would have them. You would go to a fair or festival and someone would be set up with a booth with display cases filled with POGs. Taco Bell and Pizza Hut gave them away as promo prizes. McDonalds had Power Rangers POGs. You got a mini booster pack of them and the goal was to get the whole set.
Nowadays everything is a blind bag or box toy. There is a whole row of toys at Walmart that are just $10 plastic balls with a mystery toy inside. I would complain about how expensive that is but I just sold nearly 5 grand in individual Magic cards in the last two weeks. I am in no position to complain about the cost of toy gambling. But in reality that's what it is.
You can't go to the store and pick out the green stuffed animal, you have to buy a box with a random stuffed animal in hopes of pulling the green one. You buy more and more until you get it, right? Gross. It's fun once in a while but not for everything.
In 2021 I got into buying NFT's right before they blew up. It was too hard to mint one before they revealed so I bought right after, when the price dipped. Those who minted usually got two NFT's. They didn't show you what you really had until about a day or so later when the dev team would reveal them for everyone. You might end up with one with super common traits that would be worth less than another NFT in the set with super rare traits. Those with rarer traits could be sold for more money. Same goes for literally all these blind bag/box toys.
Anyway, there was a set of these called Cool Cats that had just revealed and people were selling them for cheap in order to buy into the next project. I picked up about 4 of them for next to nothing. I got ones that I thought looked fun but were of low rarity. Three months later those cat jpegs went from .05 to .5 ETH. Then they went to .8, 1 ETH. 1.5 ETH. I sold them every time the price spiked. One cat bought me a brand new iPad. One of them made enough to repair the entire back fence of our house. I don't have anymore of these things because I liquidated them all not too long after things started to cool off.
I knew those jpegs wouldn't hold value forever. I knew that stuffed animals wouldn't hold their value forever. We should have been buying packs of Pokemon cards and not opening them in 1997. But buying and holding is not what makes collectibles fun. I still have a gallon zip loc bag of all my old POGs. Did I ever actually play the game with anyone? No. Are they still fun to look at? Yes. Did I try to go nuts and overspend on the things to try and get the rarest or most valuable at the time? No.
That's where this stuff will get you. I spent ten seconds looking in the Labubu subreddit and knew exactly what was going on. They are fun little stuffed animals on a keychain you attach to your purse. They cost $25 from the official shop. They come in a box, bagged up so you can't tell what color it is. There is one color that is rarer than the others and of course fetches a higher price on secondary. The issue? The Pop Mart website restocks the things almost every other day. They have made tons of them. Scarcity is not the real issue here. Demand is greater than supply. People want a certain color but can't get it because it's a blind box item. You can't buy on secondary because they could be fake. (Most likely are fake.) It's kind of a mess. I did an experiment and ordered one from a 3rd party seller a month ago. We will see how fake it looks in a few days. But I see folks with piles of these little guys, trying to get all the colors, the full collection. But what reminded me of the olden days of collecting things was that they also decorate the little dudes. They put little hats on them and dress them up. Some people customize them with Rit dye or repaint the face. That kind of thing is what I like about collectibles.
If it turns out the thing is real I'll buy that 90's Jansport mini backpack to put it on. XD
But that's the fun part. There is obviously a downside to chasing things. Last year I started buying sealed Pokemon cards, opening them and selling the "hits". Granted, this was 151 and the hits were valuable enough to offset the cost of the sealed product. I would buy a booster box or two of each set that came out, Surging Sparks did great. Then, this winter I bought 4 boxes of Journey Together. I still have 3.75 boxes worth of Journey Together because none of the hits really were "hits".
I had the same issue with Magic cards early this year. Innistrad Remastered collector boxes were $400 each. I got 1. I got a Markov out of it and some other stuff but it in no way paid for itself. I did great during the previous summer and fall with MH3, Bloomburrow, Duskmourn, and Foundations. Then I lost even more money on Aetherdrift. Cards that were technically rare, borderless foil cards that are only in the collector boxes were pulling, maybe a dollar instead of ten. Tarkir did great because the set was actually good. Final Fantasy was a fluke because it's not really a Magic set for the players, it's a Magic set for collectors.
Collectability is part of the whole structure of these collectible card games. Foil cards are a treat for collectors. They actually make playing the game harder because the foil makes it too dark to read the card sometimes. Special treatments, special art, etc are for the collectors to go after. But sometimes that makes the regular game cards hard for players to get because the collectors are buying up boxes with no intention of opening them. They put them on a shelf to accrue value.
The trouble is, Wizards has to sell the cards in a profitable manner. If they put out play boosters with no foils, no borderless treatments, no nothing people would buy less of them. If I knew, with a little bit of math, how many booster packs or boxes I would need to buy to statistically have a playable deck of cards from a set I would just do that. Why buy a random extra pack if I already have the cards I need? Putting in foils and stuff gives the players something to chase after, and therefore sells more packs.
Do I think Wizards would benefit the playerbase by selling a premade cube from each new set? Yes. Most chase cards have a cheaper "normal" version that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to use in your deck. Example: I bought the FFX Commander deck precon. It comes with a Yuna, Grand Summoner card. It's foil. It's got a normal border and she comes in every precon. She isn't worth but a few bucks and can't be used in standard. But, there is a borderless version of the card in collector boosters that is not available in the play boosters. No commander cards are available in the play boosters - which is STUPID.
I know play boosters' entire point is to be used for drafting. I know. But, everyone and their dog plays commander. It's ok to put 1 commander card in each play pack. Throw the art card in the trash, we have enough land. Give us random commander cards because that borderless version of Yuna, Grand Summoner is a whopping $100 in NON foil. For one card. Because it looks cool and all the collector boosters are $100 each right now. The normal version I have has the same text and effects so obviously I won't be changing her out. I also won't go buying collector boosters just to chase 1 card. I already pulled surge Cloud and surge Sephiroth and a blue Ink chocobo - my luck is over. I'll never pull that Yuna, but I don't need her to play the deck.
Some people go all out with collecting. They will spend $100 a pack to chase a single card. They will buy high when their chances are low. You have to know when to back off. There is always going to be another "Thing" out there to collect. You don't ever have to go into debt trying to show off your trinkets to internet friends when you need to be buying groceries and paying bills.
If you want to buy little stuffed animal keychains for your purse, by all means do it, but don't get so wound up in the hype that you put yourself into debt chasing a certain one. That Tamagotchi I had in 7th grade? Bandai still makes them. They are $19.99 at the store in a dozen colors and themes. My POGs? Worthless to anyone buying them now but worth it to me to keep because I remember spending hours trading them with friends.
"Oh you got the green one? I have a red one, do you want to trade for it?" <-- the basis of what makes collecting fun.
"Oh there is a green one? It's $400? I've got that left in my account. Everyone on TikTok will love it!" <-- basis for what makes collecting toxic.