Now, one of the aspects of my getting #1's cards via EBAY is that, while she has remarkably complete collections of the basic cards of various sets (there are like 20 different "sets" of Pokemon, with new ones coming every six months or so!), she does not have as good a representation of the "rare" cards like the Holographics (and the nefarious new "reverse holographics", which duplicate the entire set of more recent cards) than if she got them pack-by-pack (each of which should include one rare or holo, and one reverse holo in later sets). {Edit: see ... I told you that you weren't going to care about the details of this post!} So, rather than getting, say, 1 in 30 cards being a holographic and 1 in 10 cards being a reverse holo, she has only what shows up either when I buy "pig in a poke" big sets of cards, or what I go out and get her on a card-for-card basis. Fortunately, if one is disciplined on EBAY, one can cherry-pick auctions with no compettion, getting a card here, a few others there, and not spending more than a couple of bucks at a go.
It is amazing, though, what some of these cards do go for! The one pictured here just sold for $18.39 ... for one card. Being the obsessive-compulsive guy that I am, of course, I have delved into researching "the market" for the various cards, and have put together a short list of places to check for what "the cards are really worth", with a high, medium, and low priced site (or at least those are how they typically line up, there has been variation card-to-card). Here's what the Neo Genesis 9/111 Holographic Lugia listed for at each:
$15.00 at cardhaus.com
$39.99 at conwaycollectibles.com
$75.00 at pokeorder.com (on sale, marked down from $95.00!)
Needless to say, I wasn't bidding on this, but it is interesting that the winning bid on the auction came in at about what one could go and BUY the card for (actually, figuring shipping in both instances, the cardhaus.com option would have been less)! I'm fascinated by the interplay of the "card collecting" dynamic and the "EBAY" dynamic ... as sometimes cards go for "top end" prices, and yet other times they'll be "cut rate" (as an example, recently a complete set of "Base2" cards went for $25.50 when the holographic cards alone from the set were listed at a total of over $150 on the mid priced site, with individual card prices ranging from $2.99 to $29.99!). This, of course, does sometimes make me think that I could "make a killing on EBAY" by snatching up stuff like those full sets and then selling the cards individually!
Anyway, I had this shit running around my head and I felt a need to spew it out here. I doubt anybody's still reading this far down in any case!