alric wrote:shaitani wrote:alric wrote:
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Then some months later they'll sell them again saying "only 700 available", over and over again. We've seen D$D and T11 pull this bullshit in the past.
I've only been collecting a relatively short time so i might not have experienced what you're talking about. But, can you provide specific examples for these two sellers?
I know for sure Ellusionist does this, I can pull up emails where they've outright lied, but I've never seen Theory 11 do it. Dan and Dave do some grandiose talking about their decks (which I consider completely legitimate) but I've also never heard them lie to or trick their customers.
D$D are probably the worst offenders. Just look back at the red Smoke & Mirrors (v.6). Dan and Dave advertised, as they had with their previous decks, that the v.6 is also super limited, never to be printed again. They sold thousands and then claimed to be sold out. About 6 months later, they claimed they found a few more bricks somehow stashed away un-noticed in their attic, and then sold thousands more. You can't make this stuff up, they actually claimed they somehow found more decks in their attic! With every version of the S&M decks, they swore they would never re-print them again, then they went ahead and reprinted the entire series - 10,000 of each version!
Say what you will about E (and they're plenty full of shit), but at least they were transparent enough to disclose the print runs on their decks so we would actually know if they were in fact "limited" or not. With the exception of the White Centurions, T11 never disclosed the print runs of any of their "limited" decks. The only reason they finally gave up the print run of the White Cents was because it was probably the only deck that was in fact printed in actual limited numbers.
Wow, so I've never bought a smoke and mirrors deck before, but I didn't know about the "we found more in our attic" play, that move is pretty douchey. It's a clear attempt to manipulate the rarity and interest if it's true.
Regarding Theory 11, I don't consider non-disclosure of print numbers to be a douchebag thing to do. I mean, we all know they print a huuge number of everything in order to be able to sell their gold foil decks at $10 a pop and still make money. But I'd rather the company tell me nothing about the number, which just leaves it to me whether I want the deck or not, than to purposely mislead or outright lie about the numbers.
Ellusionist on the other hand is absolutely NOT transparent, they constantly mess around with their numbers, for example when Madison Select came out, they played the pronoun game by making this claim: "With only 2,000 box sets produced". Well, this is bad grammar, so it is purposely constructed to make the reader believe there is only 2000 of each of the decks inside. But of course, not long after they released another 500 or whatever of each because "obviously" there were more decks they claimed, so that 2000 claim is for the literal box that the contents are being sold in. I shouldn't have to put on my lawyer glasses to figure out what the hell they mean with their numbers. If they were being transparent they'd tell us exactly how many of each deck were produced.
Now, I personally hope JR isn't playing the same kind of grammar game, but as of right now the page for the White Edition actually says "only 900 white editions produced". I'm not sure if he made a correction or what but that's a lot clearer. If I had to bet I'd say he did a print of 1000 of the Verum Videre decks total, and then put 900 in white tucks, 72 in the gold tucks, and then kept some number of the 28 remaining ones for himself or for another edition or for future sales or whatever.
