Posted By:
Brian McQueenI agree with David on this one. Bidding a high amount early on is almost like "showing your hand" to your competitors. If they know what you're doing, they'll have several days to decide whether or not to try and bid higher or chip away at your max bid. Significant bidding early on also alerts others to who might be wanting the card in general and what competition you might be facing.
As far as a sniping service is concerned, if I really want the card, I will NEVER, EVER let a machine replace me in the final few seconds of an auction. There are too many ways in which these things can fail. For instance, did you know that if you change your Ebay ID, you have to change your configuration on your sniping service as well? Several people I know haven't remembered that and have lost out on cards they really wanted.
Anson brings up a good point too. The more savvy bidders out there can render the sniping services useless. Hard to explain but one thing I can say is that its really hard to capture the "pace" of an auction with one of these services. You may set your snipe properly and whatnot, but subsequent bidding at any point leading up to the final minute could carry the value past your snipe and you might not even realize it since you'd be away from your computer.