New and Shiny - Market Manipulation

[Exhibitman]

They call it collecting the rainbow. It can get very frustrating when they get to the 1/3, 1/2 and 1/1 cards, for obvious reasons.

[G1911]

The odds that, for specific example, Backyard Breaks pulls what they pull without being fed product from Panini is somewhere around 0%. Some of these influencers just defy the massive odds again and again and get loaded box after loaded box (not just the box with an X type hit, but the big name everyone is trying to pull types). Panini has clearly been marking boxes in some product with the good cards, probably Topps too.

A lot of modern looks great, but there’s a ton of corruption, backroom feeding of hits, and some huge hits straight up never even being packed out at all (like the 3 1/1 Ford’s in Star Wars Stellar a couple years ago - $10K a box and the biggest hits evidently weren’t even packed).

I’m surprised some people still want to believe so much that they throw away math and reason and keep playing this blatantly rigged game and screaming that everything is just fine.

There’s still a ton of fun in modern hobby land if you’re enjoying base and sets and the plethora of design options. Chasing the top .1% of stuff is a rigged game.