Worst deal ever made(so far).

General
1

Hello all, would like to know what was the worst deal you guys have made because I think I have made mine today, for now.

So I am fairly new to Yahoo auctions and decided to buy some stuff there and ended up getting an unlimited rayquaza star and an unlimited plasma gale charizard. For the star, there was no picture of the back but since it looked good on the front and being a Japanese card I was like, ‘yeah why not’. So I bought it for the BIN price. When it arrived today, the back has whitening issues and could at most get a 7 with PSA. Same thing happened with the Zard. Since I got it on Noppin(Japanese auction middleman service), I can’t return the items, or at least don’t know how, so I’m now stuck with them. They do look good in my binder which I am fairly pleased but paying £170 for those 2 cards after shipping and customs, I’m pretty sure I could easily get something else with better value. Oh well, learned an expensive lesson today, always make sure you know what you are getting. :blush:

What about you guys? Or do you collectors only get good deals :thinking:

1 Like
2

I haven’t made too many bad deals I couldn’t return. I did invest $50 in a set of 4 magic cards when I was considering building a deck and then the card got banned and I sold the set for $12. I’m usually extremely careful with big purchases. But it happens to all of us I can assure you and with rare Pokemon cards - overpaying by a little is never a very negative investment.

3 Likes
3

My worst deal was when I started recollecting didn’t know how cheap singles sold, so I spent $300 in booster packs and only pulled like 12 EXs.

Where as if I just bought the singles it would have been $60 lol

3 Likes
4

Similar to @maverick75 All of my bad deals/stupid purchases have been buying an expensive amount of booster packs and not getting my pulls worth. Don’t get me wrong, opening packs is super fun and addictive, but not cost effective for a collector like me who wants to complete sets. I used to have a Youtube channel where I opened packs, but I ended up buying lots of tins/EX boxes that I didn’t really care about. Why buy a $20 tin when I could buy a really nice single EX for the same price? I only buy packs when a new sets comes out 'cause I’m starting from complete scratch and every pull is a win.

Singles wise, I’ve only been screwed when I’ve not been paying attention. I’ve bought a few “NM” cards that I didn’t check well enough (because everyone knows what NM is, right? Wrong.) and the cards arrived with creases, so I lost money having to replace them. This is why I don’t trust any Ebay listings without a back pic, no matter how good the front looks. Back tells all, man, back tells all.

Last one is more ignorance/bad planning/collecting craze. I started to get seriously back into collecting about two years ago, and by “serious” I mean not really. Not as serious as now. I bought a bunch of random stuff without a battle plan/budget put in place, so I ended up with a lot of random cards I didn’t need. I bought so many of those dumb random Ebay lots… So many. All I can say is thank god for budgeting and planning. I’m a much happier collector now.

4 Likes
5

Some pointers for Yahoo.

  1. You can’t return anything. It isn’t eBay, there is no buyer protection.
  2. While some Japanese customers can be very picky most people aren’t I want a PSA 9/10 picky. Also, sellers never want to sell to those people, that is why they say something about nervous people don’t bid. Even for new cards they say don’t mind the initial scratch, which usually means there could be 1-2 small white marks.
  3. Always make sure there is a back scan or you are getting an incredible price. This excludes a lot of auctions, but it’s a lot safer.
  4. A fair amount of sellers don’t take care of their cards. Some sellers, I don’t know what they do, but you can buy brand new cards and lots of them will come with small nicks, at a lot higher rate then if you opened a box yourself.
3 Likes
6

Some bad deals were paying for pre-orders of a soon-to-be-released card, and then having the prices drop to less than halve three weeks after it has been released. Had this a couple of times, so now I won’t pre-order anymore, and depending on the amount that is being sold on eBay I decide whether to buy it in the week of release, or a couple of weeks afterwards after the price has dropped. These differences are usually 40 → 20 or 18 → 5 USD or something similar, so nothing too crazy.

As for my worst deal: buying the third YOU Wagon Pikachu that was put up for sale this year. The Pikachu YOU Wagon promo was released a couple of years ago, and I hadn’t seen a single one for sale since I started collecting Pikachus in October 2015. About a month ago one popped up on the Japan Yahoo, and it ended at 135,000 Japanese Yen (~1,175 USD), which I lost (my max bid was 105,000 btw).
After that first sale, another one popped up which was sold for 95,000 buy-out within two hours before I even saw it; and the third one started at 1 for which I placed a bid of 77,777. That same week 5-10 more auctions for this card popped up, varying from 65,000-100,000. All due to that first high sold price.

I eventually won that third one for 77,000 (just 777 below my max bid…). I would have preferred to be outbid, because there were some for 65,000 buy-out available, but ‘unfortunately I won’ (and no, I couldn’t cancel my bid at the Middleman website I used). Now there are still a couple for sale, with the current price varying at around 30,000-45,000, which is less than halve of what I paid for mine. The lowest that is currently for sale is 200 USD on eBay (bidding however, not buy-out). Needless to say, I should have waited just like with those pre-orders. In just one month time I could have saved around 500 USD.

Having said all that, I’m still happy to have it in my collection, and I haven’t regret buying it. Yes, the price is still lowering, and I could have saved a lot of money, but what if the opposite was true? What if that third one I placed a bid on would have been the last, and I wouldn’t have won it? It’s a beautiful card, and at first I was already kinda pissed that the first one went this high causing me to loose. Now I’m just glad to have it, and I left the pricing of the ones that are for sale as we speak behind me.

My motto in my hobbies is: “I only have to spend the money once, and then I can enjoy the item for the rest of my life.” Well, that’s exactly what I did. :blush:

Btw, this is the card I’m taking about for anyone not familiar with it:

Here is an article with some more information regarding it’s release at the end of 2014.

Oh, one other thing that was a pretty bad deal… I came across a ‘Thin stamp’ Base Pikachu. Or so I thought. I was in a bidding war with two other people, and eventually won it for little over 100 USD, with an additional 50 USD shipping from the US to me. I was very happy to finally come across one, and even more happy I won it.

When I received it everything seemed fine, and I was still happy with it. Only the day after when I took another look at it I noticed something odd: it wasn’t Shadowless!.. Although the card looked very real, after doing the light-test I indeed confirmed my fear: it was a fake card…

I did get the money back for which I won the auction (after about two months and in two separate refund-sections…), but I did loose on the 50 USD shipping… Ah well, I did learn to double-check every image before making a purchase since then. And unfortunately I’m still looking for a Thin stamp Base Pikachu…

Greetz,
Quuador

3 Likes
7

To make matters worse all of mine were Generations, so they had high pull rates. I would literally open 6 packs in a row and not get a single EX lol

These were from boxes bought at Target/Walmart so it wasn’t like if I was buying loose packs that were weighed, Generations just hated me.

8

@quuador That wagon pikachu is a tough one. There is always someone who has to be that first buyer that brings the cards out of the woodwork. You da real mvp. :blush:

5 Likes
9

I bought 4 cases of evolutions to sit on. I got them at cost price and I live outside the US so I’ll make a 20-30 profit on each box if I get sick of waiting but there’s definitely better ways to use that money.

I have a non-Pokemon example but it’s recent. In Yu-Gi-Oh! a new set came out last month called Fusion Enforcers so I decided to buy out what thought would end up becoming the most expensive card in the set. To give some context there would have been 3 cards needed to play a certain deck released in this set, what they do isn’t really that important so I’ll just call them A, B and C. You need to play 3 copies of card A and only 2 copies of cards B and C.

I bought 20 copies of card A for $220 because I thought it would be the most sought after card in the set, this was on release day and this was the cheapest price I could find. Relatively speaking the rest of the set should have been worthless because of how easy it would have been to pull every card in the set.

This would have been the correct play but wait, there’s more. In Yu-Gi-Oh! there are 2 different prints of every set, one is the US print which is made in Texas, the other is the European print made in Belgium. In the US print cards B and C were short printed so instead of being 1 per box like the European print product they were 3-4 per case (a case has 12 boxes). The price of card A is now $5, card B is $55 and card C is $32.

In Australia, where I live, we have European print product but we use US prices to value cards… so I lost a lot because I spoke to local vendors and vendors from the UK and Germany to get my intel.

The silver lining is that I quickly realised what happened and went and bought 20 copies of card C for $220 as well, so I broke even if I’m never able to sell card A.

2 Likes
10

Worst deal I made was buying a couple of organized binders with the description that it had an estimated 4000 to 5000 cards and lots of holos. The picture that was up showed 5 binders, 3 really thick ones, an old rocket binder and a thinner binder. It was a bit of a rushed deal cause she already had a buyer who eventually backed out and she said she didn’t have time to take pictures of it all. She just wanted to get rid of it all asap so I took the gamble. I decided to have it shipped instead of picking it up cause it was a bit of a distance away from me. Upon receiving the binders (which were shipped in a terrible box with no padding at all) I counted 4 binders instead of 5, and both the thinner binder and the rocket binder that were in the picture were not in there. Counting the cards I only received roughly 2500 cards. Even worse was that it looked to me like all of the valuables were picked out of the binders before shipping. Gaps in the sets that seemed too specific for it to be random, and the amount of holos in relation to the amount of commons/uncommons was far below average.

I called the seller out on it and she just ignored me. After repeated ignoring I managed to get her details via a separate account by asking for a pickup of another item she was selling and managed to find contact info of her boyfriend who happened to be into card games as well. The boyfriend wanted to make a professional living off of selling card games so thankfully he was interested in remedying the situation cause he didn’t want this to damage his reputation. He sent me a couple more cards that were of a little bit of value and I called it even. I still think it’s a bit shady cause he didn’t tell his girlfriend that he sent me cards. He wanted to keep it between us.

It was on a Dutch craigslist kinda site called Marktplaats and they have no recourse for scamming. I paid via bank transfer so I couldn’t get my money back either cause I authorized the payment myself and banks here don’t refund when you authorize a payment yourself.

I learned my lesson to
a) not buy from Marktplaats anymore, scammer heaven
b) ask for a pickup address/seller details before I ask them to ship it
c) ask for pictures of the content or just let it go.

2 Likes
11

I remember trading a RH Uxie and RH mespirit at their peak, for a shiny swabulu, I had no idea of the card values :slightly_frowning_face: RIP those RH probably still worth more than the shiny today…

Trading Bulk for boxes on pokebeach, because I never heard of other people doing so, at 2000 per box, when it was already to go for 1400 specials on fb, and it was 12000 cards… at least it was for a case of flash fire :blush:

once on top cut, I saw the buylist had delcatty ex at $22, and decided to buy 5 of them at $3-5 , thinking i could be sneaky and make some good money, only to see that my buylist was approved except for the delcatty, reduced to $2 , so i kept them :slightly_frowning_face:

as with anyone else, I’ve had my fair share of no pulls with packs, I opened around 75 unweighed ROS and got M ray, 2 gallade, m gallade 2 thundurus, thundurus fa, and dragon ray, doesn’t get much worse than that :slightly_frowning_face:

Trading a luxray lvx for a japanese one and a shiny gyarados at worlds 2010, that was a really bad one

selling 1 of my 2 worlds 2010 mats for $40 a few weeks after the tournament, some guy walked past, and said he would have given $80, right after i sold it :slightly_frowning_face:

probably have a lot more, which i can’t think of, but I’ve also had ridiculous deals, like 40 code cards of PLS for 2 SR charizards at release …

12

selling my non holo psa 10 shadowless 1st edition set plus zapdos and blastoise 3 weeks before pokemon go and ended losing about £4000 on that now i will never be able to afford to get the set in 10s

13

Marktplaats is indeed one of the worst places ever as secondhand market… The idea is good, and marktplaats has been bought by the owners of ebay, but the majority of Dutch people (us excluded of course) is just scum… And it’s not just for Pokémon card, it’s for everything on marktplaats.

I will be honest, there are of course good sellers as well. I’m selling cards on marktplaats myself, and I always ship in toploaders (and bubblewrap envelops on request), and take pictures of every slight crease, fold, etc.
I’ve also bought some great quality items on marktplaats, so there are good sellers out there.

That having said, about 50% of the time after someone contacted you to buy something, they eventually don’t respond to messages at all anymore. When people ask if they can come to pick it up instead of having it send, about 75% of the time no one shows up, and you sometimes even wasted time by being home waiting for them…
My dad has this happen a lot for fishing related stuff he’s selling.

As for quality, although some were as advertised, about 80% of all cards I bought from marktplaats so far have been lightly played quality at best, and in some cases even very heavy played… The puzzles I bought from marktplaats so far were as advertised fortunately…

As for c, I personally almost never buy anything without a picture, unless I know I could get my money back through ebay/PayPal. Not an option with marktplaats & bank transfer, knowing how bad quality most are…

Greetz,
Quuador

2 Likes
14

Yeah I hate dealing with Marktplaats buyers/sellers. There are some good sellers for sure but the bad outweighs the good on there, at least in my opinion. It’s just too scam sensitive.

Possibly a worse deal I’ve made is me selling my old binders in like 2008 cause I needed cash for my other hobby of CD collecting. I had pretty much everything complete up until neo destiny and had a bunch of e-reader cards from expedition, aquapolis and skyridge as well (not that many cause I bought those cards when my interest was waning). Always stored the cards in a proper way, had sleeves and everything as a kid and when I got something out of a pack I’d sleeve it straight away. I had a complete set of black star promos, a complete set of shinings including a 1st edition shining charizard that I pulled myself fresh from a pack as well as a complete 1st edition neo discovery and near complete 1st edition revelation set cause I got booster boxes for those for my birthday. Plenty of legendary collection cards as well. Two binders for the main sets and 1 thin binder for the black star promos.
What did I end up selling those binders for?

350 euros…

I was young, only had a low paying sidejob and had no idea of the value in my binders. Seeing shining charizard 1st edition for prices nearly as high as the total price I got for my binders makes me weep inside. At least one of us got a ridiculously good deal. :sob:

edit: I’ve shifted to Japanese collecting and my collection is far bigger and more interesting now than it was back then (though I’m still missing a bunch of shining cards), but I still regret selling all of that for such a bargain lol

15

If you bought collectible cd’s that increased in value you’d still be ok?

16

The CDs I bought at the time have gone up in value but not nearly as much as pokemon cards have in the past few years. I don’t regret getting the CDs though, just the fact that I lowballed myself by letting those cards go for that cheap lol. Even back then they were worth more than 350

17

Holy shit (virtual hug)

18

cheers i sold them and the the massive price hike and the person i sold them too sold the non holo set for double what i sold it to him for :slightly_frowning_face:

19

I only make good deals. The best deals. Bigly deals with very smart people.

1 Like
20

4 Likes