I had a bunch of beta black lotus an moxs and the white border but i sold all my cards. I didn’t think anyone still played. It just got ridiculous the amount if expansions always coming out and whole ton of thievery and veterans of the game cheating newbies out of their good cards for garbage ones. I was glad to get out.
Ugh… I saw a beta black lotus once as a kid in a comic shop…
Now you can put a down payment on a house with one. XD;
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Ultimately this just seems like a lesson in market economics. The market price of something has nothing to do with what a seller thinks the value is or what they paid for it. It is set by the most recent sale of that good by the amount a buyer and seller agreed for it to be sold for. If you believe the value of something to be $200 but people are only willing to pay $75 for it, it’s natural for someone to come down to the top buyer price and pay $75. Now branding etc has a lot to do with what you can sell something for, so you can charge a premium if your brand stands out and offers something others don’t or can’t, but those that don’t have your brand and are essentially selling the same product can sell the product at that premium so they sell lower. This is extraordinarily typical in free markets.
Ralph Lauren can sell a polo shirt for $120, but target also sells polo shirts for like $20. So more people are going to buy their shirts at target, because it’s $20. But, Ralph Lauren doesn’t want to drop their prices because they believe their product is a higher quality so they attempt to attract premium buyers. For lack of a better word, quality buyers over quantity buyers.
Closer to reptiles, people sell CBB water monitors for $400-$600. NERD almost never sells for under $1000. Love em or hate em, Kevin has built a brand around his socialization of the animals from birth, produces content viewed by thousands and talks about quality of the lines he produces. Because of this, he has built a premium brand for water monitors and there are many people that will wait longer to afford a monitor from him at a premium than from someone else. He has a differentiating factor.
So if you want to sell your animals for $200 when others are selling for $75, then you have to have something differentiating you from the $75 sellers AND there has to be a market of premium buyers willing to purchase from you. If neither of those exist, the market price for your geckos is not $200, even if that’s what you value them at.
Additionally, in the reptile hobby, rarity drive price. So if you get into something early, you have to take into account that you are going to pay more for what you get than what you produce (an a per animal basis). Obviously things like a sudden increase in demand for a species drives the price as well, but all else equal, as the species/morph becomes more common, it becomes less expensive. That’s a risk you take getting into a species early when they’re expensive. This hobby, like any other market or business, is not without risks. And new market entrants are a risk. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just means they are part of the market that you need to take into account. Buy them out, differentiate yourself to compete, match their prices, something to drive your business. But complaining about new entrants has worked for very very few businesses historically.
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