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People find it difficult to appreciate things they don’t pay for. Pay close attention sometime to an office or cafeteria setting at work on days where free food and drinks or a highly discounted menu is available. People will leave half drank soda bottles on the table, won’t recycle, chips fall on the floor; and none of it comes at any cost or with any responsibility to those being served. If I tell you this option comes along once a year, most people be much more measured and let nothing go to waste.
Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.
In my own life I’m a huge fan of horror cinema. I’ve loved the Halloween franchise for as long as I can remember watching it as a kid. And I have quite a lot of horror memorabilia. I have a signed John Carpenter kitchen knife, several autographed items, and other rare collectibles that practically make a shrine I’ve got dedicated to the genre itself. The cinematic masterpiece of all these franchises and aesthetics and the historical “link” it has to the items I own gives me a great sense of feeling attached and connected to the things I enjoy that I wouldn’t otherwise have.
I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered - randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.
But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.
Yeah the current arc of the TCG market feels sufficiently mature that it's gotta be close to another big correction, but I don't think that necessarily renders the whole thing valueless. Even NFTs haven't like literally gone to zero even if you've obviously gotten absolutely fucked if you got in anywhere near the top.
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Exactly, you’d probably feel cheated if it turned out the autographs were all done on auto pen by an assistant even if the signature was indistinguishable. The reason art is valuable is generally much closer to the reason memorabilia is valuable.
And actually people try to make the same kind of arguments about the “1st edition” having some special property or unique trait, like saying a Stradivarius has a magical sound modern violins don’t have, even though no one can actually distinguish between them in a blind test. Isn’t it enough to say that a Stradivarius is valuable because it’s a high quality 300 year old instrument made by the most famous luthier in the world, without having to resort to nonsense about no one else being able to reproduce the sound?
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