A Quick Diversion:  

The Actual News:

Today’s news will cover these topics:

  • Again with the Logan Paul! – Illustrator Card Doesn’t Sell
  • Meanwhile in Magic Land…
  • This week’s Safari Zone HD Remaster Cards are for the Birds!

 

 

Again with the Logan Paul! – Illustrator Card Doesn’t Sell

On one hand I guess I can say that this isn’t Logan Paul’s fault… but I’m gonna blame him for it anyways.

So Kotaku posted an article last week talking about how an Illustrator card went up for auction, with a starting bid of US$480,000… and no one bought it. And I think that’s just flippin’ hilarious. Especially considering that Logan Paul is expecting people to pay some portion of US$600,000.

Y’know what I’m thinking… something suspicious is going on about all these hot collectables being “sold” for high amounts of cash, like with Wata Games. I mean, like, at least Logan Paul is choosing legitimately popularly valuable cards in the TCG like the Illustrator card, 1st Edition Charizard, and a box of 1st Edition Base Set… as opposed to “Super Mario Bros” or so. But of course that doesn’t make what he does OK, because as far as I’m concerned, all Logan is doing is trying to do is a pump-and-dump… hype everyone up on something and dumping it before anyone realizes what he’s doing. What ends up happening is that legitimate owners and fans are left with cards they think are worth more than they actually are, and when they try to sell it, nothing happens. The fact that this US$480,000 sale fell through just shows that Logan Paul’s estimate of its worth is overblown, likely based solely on his star power. Like, it’s “valuable”, not because of the card’s inherent value as a piece of the Pokémon TCG history and more because “Logan Paul owns it”.

Which, I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the idea that Logan Paul isn’t actually interested in a fan as much as he’s interested in grifting people. There are plenty of situations where extra value in an otherwise normally valued collectables comes from the story behind it… for example, the “Amazing Spider-Man” comic that was trashed by an angry girlfriend, which has gained extra value solely on the story. This was an organic increase in value, not some kind of grift conjoured up by said angry girlfriend and the boyfriend who owned it. So yeah, Logan Paul’s star power is what is making his Illustrator card “worth” US$600,000, because clearly it’s not even worth US$480,000.

 

 

Meanwhile in Magic Land…

I’m still trying to write up a list of all the ways Magic the Gathering and the Pokémon TCG are more alike than not… ignoring the fact that the original PTCG designers played MTG and that PTCG was once run by Wizards of the Coast. But these similarities keep on coming… the last major one was the creation of the “colorless mana” symbol which looked an awful lot like the “colorless Energy” symbol… but naw, just a coincidence:

The thing is, back when PTCG first came out, it was very clearly rooted in the designs of MTG. But as of late, maybe because PTCG has lasted so long or MTG is just getting more and more creatively bankrupt, MTG’s devs seem to be pulling more and more ideas from PTCG. Case in point… Team Ups!

So I hear that in the next Magic the Gathering set—titled March of the Machines—they’re going to release a few (six?) cards which are team ups of important characters in the MTG mythos. Take a look:


Remind you of anything?

Ok yeah, it’s not exactly the same… there isn’t a special rule for MTG’s Team Ups relative to PTCG’s Tag Teams… but c’mon, you can’t tell me that there wasn’t some heavy inspiration going on here. For starters, like with PTCG’s Tag Teams, MTG’s Team Ups seem to mix the qualities of both cards together, such as their power/toughness, creature types, and colors.

So take your bets on what card type from PTCG that MTG will be inspired by? I wouldn’t be surprised that they started making “Evolution” cards or something in MTG where you can’t play a creature card unless an existing creature card is in play, and in playing it it gets all the same stats, counters, and what-have-yous as the existing creature. Now that may be too on the nose, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up happening that way.

 

 

This week’s Safari Zone HD Remaster Cards are for the Birds!

This week’s Safari Zone HD Remaster Cards—again beautifully designed by GC|Linkinboss—involve birds! Yes, all of them are birds, all four are bird Pokémon, and none of them are not-bird Pokémon. They’re also all basic, but they’re not basic in our hearts.

Amazing Transformation would’ve been A PAIN IN THE ASS to rule correctly, so I’m kinda glad it was never printed in English. It’s bad enough that Fossil Ditto had so many different ruling matters—like, IIRC for a while there, if you benched your Ditto and then brought it back out, it reset itself and thus could use another instance of a Pokémon Power (particularly one labeled “once per turn”). This Ditto… jeez, forget it. There’s a reason why we haven’t seen a clone Pokémon after all these years.

The other ones are just standard Basics… so I wonder what their evolution cards will look like? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

 

 

I wanted to post more, but I’ve just been so busy lately… but I’m hoping to get another post out with some more stuff later on. I don’t like making promises and not keep them, so we’ll see what happens.

As always I want to thank you for visiting and helping make this site worth while. Always remember that you are an awesome person and you are always appreciated by the people in your life (but don’t let them take you for granted!). 😊