Quote:
Originally Posted by WhenItWasAHobby
So I make my perfunctory semi-annual visit to Net54 just to see what's going on and it is truly astounding that the "hobby" has devolved to such a deplorable state of affairs with voluminous unconscionable business practices with no corrective action in sight and yet cards are still escalating in price. How mind-boggling.
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As your nom de 54 says so well, Dan, it's no longer really a hobby. When it was, originality mattered, because people were mostly in it for love of the cards, and altering a card without disclosure violated every norm by creating artificially improved cards and skewing the natural stratification of cards according to how well they had survived. New cards out of packs all more or less looked the same, so nobody really cared about whether under a loupe they were mint or gem mint. With the overwhelming shift of focus to value, cards are commodities and originality matters much less. That's all it is.
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My avatar is a sketch by my son who is an art school graduate. Some of his sketches and paintings are at
https://www.jamesspaethartwork.com/
He is available to do custom drawings in graphite, charcoal and other media. He also sells some of his works as note cards/greeting cards on Etsy under JamesSpaethArt.