Has anyone here attempted a buyout on a vintage card in the past few years? How did it go?

Curious if anyone here has tried this. I remember Mary got bought out due to the speculation of competitive vintage formats getting popular in the USA. I think a couple of big stores run vintage tournaments, but they definitely didn’t “take off.” Has there been another since?

I think I accidentally made this a $600 card (up from ~$30)

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I know Rudy from Alpha Investments used to do this a ton. I don’t know if it can be done to the same extent for Pokémon

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

This made my day, i was just looking at my cock on the rock collection the other day. E4 definitely cleared most cock on the rock listings during that time haha.

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A couple of years ago I attempted a buyout of PSA 9 Charizard Gold Stars. However I had to give up once I reached 1 copy since I ran out of money :stuck_out_tongue: :person_shrugging:

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Buy, out [of money]

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Funny how all the other cards from that set are worth next to nothing.
Just bought a Tropic Bird card from that set for my wife, as she used to work with that species :).

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I believe someone made an attempt to manipulate the market for NM ungraded Base Set Charizards on Ebay a few weeks/months ago. Raw NM copies were consistently going for $600-800 in auction and I noticed a certain account was constantly involved in the bidding (and usually won). Whoever it was must have realized that it was a dumb idea and gave up, because auctions stopped becoming completely unreasonable the past few weeks.

It was probably some dingus investor-bro who thought they could try and alter the market similar to modern alt-arts.

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i toyed with the idea of this about 6-7 years ago, it was relatively affordable back then to hunt down psa 10 jungle electrodes. Whilst the idea was fun, i never got around to it.

If someone has done this, they probably wouldn’t want to share, you’d probably want to keep it a secret that you have 80%+ pop of a card.

Best chance of knowing is finding out someone who did this and then sold out

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CTR has a chunk of the gold star celebi pop. I bet he wished he picked a different gold star though cause thats about the cheapest one outside the dogs

I honestly forget sometimes that celebi has a gs. :sweat_smile:

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I bought 5 of the 26 psa 10 aquapolis exeggutors just before covid (as an attempt to buy out the card). Price went up but not sure how much is due to me or covid

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Crystal guardians is pretty weak imo

good ex selection but thats about all I like from the set. Would have preferred gs jirachi/metagross/sableye for that set

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I’ve seen buyers be public about it to generate attention so hopefully others will piggyback. Probably not a good idea to do that unless you’re finished buying.

Nice try… still accumulating…

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If the cabal truly wants they can (and should) buy up all of the PCL cards.
Then, once per year one lucky cabal member is allowed to sell one card after winning a sacret ritual (burn at least one PCL card).
Easy peasy.

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I’ve done several buyouts over the years, just not in Pokémon. A buyout in Pokémon can be incredibly difficult due to the size. Too many people own too many copies of the card. It’s a lot easier in other smaller markets.

I think the trick to successful buyouts is that they aren’t necessarily intentional buyouts, but more speculative. For example, trying to buy out a card that is already popular in order to raise the price VS buyout of a card that you think could be popular or that you just really enjoy.

There have been many cards <$10 that I thought were amazing and I just wanted to own them all. I bought every copy I could find and the price jumped to $100-$400 after a couple months.

Still a buyout, but maybe less nefarious because they weren’t intentional?

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At one point I had pretty much every single Jirachi Movie Commemoration VS Pack Half Deck on eBay for maybe half a year, and a lot of them from Yahoo Japan. I’m pretty sure I’m mostly responsible for the price of the 10s from that deck dramatically dropping as well.

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Question: how many of the Forina’s Jirachi cards did you have that ACTUALLY had PSA 10-worthy centering?

I’ve opened a bunch of those decks and pretty much every Forina’s Jirachi is off-center.

I graded almost all of them because at the time 9s and 10s were both worth it. When I first started grading them, there were barely any 10s in the pop at all, especially compared to 9s. I believe I got maybe 5 10s out of like 20+ decks. They are definitely usually off center.

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