Man finds $1M worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster
404media.co> In 2023, Wizards—which publishes Magic: The Gathering—sent the Pinkerton detective agency to the home of a YouTuber who had acquired 22 boxes of cards
Born too late to get into a gun fight with striking steel workers on behalf of two guys who ended up building libraries, born just in time to chase down ill gotten Magic cards. Goodness.
Not even ill gotten, the guy had legitimately pre-ordered them and was sent them early. They turned up at his door and threatened him and his wife, awful stuff.
The Yu-Gi-Oh seller in TFA could've started blasting if they tried that with him because Texas.
I still remember an article posted on HN about a developer/designer at Apple who left an unreleased iPhone prototype at a bar/restaurant. Apple had the entire police force at their fingertips pursuing the person who found it. I don't remember much about the details, but the person who founded may have posted to social media "whoa cool, check this thing out" or something very benign, which brought a major police presence to their house thanks to an employee's mistake. IIRC this wasn't the original iPhone, it was the 3rd or 4th gen thereabouts.
> I don't remember much about the details, but the person who founded may have posted to social media "whoa cool, check this thing out" or something very benign, which brought a major police presence to their house thanks to an employee's mistake.
It was a Gizmodo editor who paid $5,000 to buy the prototype after he basically knew it was stolen property. Apple reported it and the police got a warrant because knowingly buying stolen property for $5,000 is indeed a crime.
Gizmodo also got in contact with Apple and said they'd only return the phone (which they knew was stolen at that point) if Apple agreed to a list of terms. If you withhold someone's stolen property and refuse to give it back until they cave to your demands, the law is going to get involved. Again the warrant/seizure was overkill, but Gizmodo was doing some stupid stuff.
There were a lot of sketchy details about how the original guy got the phone. IIRC he tried to claim it was a mistake and that he tried to return it once he realized he grabbed the wrong phone, but he also made no effort to actually get it back to the bar. The panicked Apple engineer was calling the bar frantically to get it back. If he had made any effort at all to return the phone instead of selling it, it would have gone right back to the engineer.
The Gizmodo reporting also had other controversies. They were milking the situation for all they could, including basically identifying the poor Apple engineer who lost the phone. Really not cool. A lot of people hated Gizmodo for the way they treated the Apple engineer while they were trying to milk that story.
EDIT: Found it https://gizmodo.com/how-apple-lost-the-iphone-4-5520438
Notice how they open with the Apple engineer's name and personal info. They tell a story that tries to make the person who had the phone sound innocent, but it also involves him going through the Facebook account on the phone and then taking it home instead of giving it to the bar staff.
Then no details about how suddenly Gizmodo came to possess it for $5,000
Thank you for finding this. As I said, I remembered very little from it. Clearly my recollection was lacking.
> they'd only return the phone (which they knew was stolen at that point) if Apple agreed to a list of terms
so it's wrong to give a T&C to a company that gives T&C to its users? You can't see the irony in this? or you are okay with it? Did apple have to wait in line just like everyone else who reports property crime to (presumably) Cupertino PD? I think not.
> so it's wrong to give a T&C to a company that gives T&C to its users? You can't see the irony in this? or you are okay with it?
What? The person had stolen property in their possession. They weren't in a position to be dictating terms of the deal because they legally did not have the right to possess the property, which they were fully aware was not owned by the person they bought it from.
> stolen
From your article: "It was the last time he ever saw the phone, right before he abandoned it on bar stool, leaving to go home."
Sounds like a clear cut case of theft to me. Absolutely
No, it's wrong (and illegal) to hold ransom someone else's stolen property.
The phone belonged to Apple. The phone was stolen (illegal). The stolen phone was then knowingly purchased as stolen property (illegal), and then the reporter demanded payment for the stolen property (once more, illegal).
> He referred to the cards as “thrown away” and said they were found in a dumpster as part of a security breach involving a contractor. He said it “involves 500,000 bulk cards (including high-value Caitlin Clark and [Quarter Century Rare] stock and 400+ factory uncut sheets.” The seller said that he’d “filed formal reports with Konami’s legal department regarding the contractor’s negligence.”He did not respond to follow-up questions.
Found in a dumpster in a shopping center that wasn't near the printing center, as part of a security breach involving a contractor, which the seller dutifully filed formal reports for?
And he found a second batch of these same sheets?
There are so many weird things going on in this story. Nobody has spoken up about them being counterfeit yet, other than the unclear warnings about them being in poor quality and refunding all of people's money when they complain.
Who knows, but counterfeit sheets being sold as new to collectors who want to believe they didn't just waste $1000 sounds like a real possibility.
Yu-Gi-Oh cards are still a thing? That dates from 30 years ago.
I just looked at Cabbage Patch dolls on eBay. The bottom has finally fallen out of that market. Used to see asking prices over $1000. Now they're all around $25.
>Yu-Gi-Oh cards are still a thing?
Yes, culturally not as relevant but gameplay wise it is very fun. The current structure decks on offer are great if you have a shop nearby or a friend to play with. Though depending on where you quit, you'd have to get used to a vastly different speed and complexity of gameplay.
I quit somewhere around Tele-DAD being popular and ran Lightsworn myself. The introduction of Synchro really changed the pace of the game. Did it speed up more since then?
Oh yes, massively so. In the last few years we got quite a few cards/archetypes that can do so called "turn 0 plays", meaning you can perform a lot of actions even on your opponent's first turn.
This adds even more complexity with the upside of preventing players from playing solitaire on their own for 10 minutes before passing an unwinnable boardstate to you.
Also most floodgates that grind the game to a halt (Gozen,Vanity's emptyness etc) are either banned or limited.
I'd say the game overall is very fun nowadays, but the original "design space" is starting to hit a ceiling with absolutely bonkers effects being printed that literally cannot be one-upped with the current rules. Read the text of Forbidden Crown to get what I mean.
wrt eBay, you mean Beanie Babies. the Cabbage Patch bubble was pre-internet 1980s
> “The sale of uncut sheets is not allowed,” Konami, the company that owns Yu-Gi-Oh, told me in an email and did not respond to follow-up questions.
That doesn't seem like enforceable thing...
Stolen or counterfeit. For people that don't know Yu-Gi-Oh $1M is a ludicrous number since Konami has and has had a very aggressive reprint policy. The value here entirely comes from the fact that it's an uncut sheet, I'd be surprised if anyone would pay that much for it.
On a side note in 2003 I opened a pack and one of the cards was just a piece of cardstock probably they just ran a few sheets through in off-impression mode and forgot about them
> just a piece of cardstock
It would be great if they created some cards like that on purpose but hidden features like fluorescent dyes, or dyes that develop over a year or two. So people throw out the blanks by mistake (until people know).
Especially if a pack always had a blank or two at deck ends for protecting end cards.
>Earlier in March, a brick and mortar store in Ohio called Table Top Gaming received a few hundred boxes of Yu-Gi-Oh cards from a distributor and found something strange inside. “The printing company packed the pallets with the test print sheets by mistake thinking they were just blank sheets. Pallets went to distro then me. I didn’t acquire them in any malicious way so I thought they were safe to sell, considered abandoned property because they were intended to be trashed,” Table Top Gaming owner Tyler Jedlicka told 404 Media.
>Jedlicka says he posted the test print sheets online and Konami contacted him. The company wanted the sheets back. Konami runs the official Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments and angering them could mean hurting a brick and mortar business, no matter how rare and expensive a test print might be. “Once we confirmed in writing with [Konami] the blame isn’t put on us and that our status as an official tournament store won’t be affected we agreed to return them all,” Jedlicka said, adding that the whole thing was resolved without a major issue.
Sounds like the mistake happened more than once but not everyone was dumb enough to sell them under their own name.
It doesn't just sound real. Blank sheets are vastly different size from shipping boxes for packed product... And printing company would not ship blank sheets. And distribution company would not forward something that clearly looks wrong...
That's the card graveyard. I play Pot of Greed. It allows me to draw two cards. I've drawn Monster Reborn. It allows me to claim the stash
Pot of Greed is illegal, in America.
“ Pot of Greed is banned in official Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament play in America (TCG) and has been since 2005. It is deemed too powerful because it allows a player to draw two cards with no cost or restrictions, providing a free advantage in any deck. ”
Reminds me of how Black Vise and Demonic Tutor were handled before the introduction of different tournament modes like Legacy.
Is a YuGiOh Abridged joke
This information may be relevant. It's in the article, but not expanded apon at all:
> Konami doesn’t have its own printers but instead contracts companies to print cards for it. One of those printers is Cartamundi, a Belgian company with a factory in Dallas. The seller’s mother’s scrapping business operates in a suburb of Dallas.
>“F*** stupid f** I bet don't know you hoes getting none of this s**,” he said in another.
I trust this guy.
About time somebody started flooding the millennial nostalgia collectibles market with fakes.
You can buy a very convincing Black Lotus for $6 on aliexpress. I’ve thought about getting one and mounting it on the wall in a picture frame for fun.
I played Lorcana for a bit then realized you can get cards that look identical under a jewelers loupe for 1/10 of the price and I got out of it. A few months later the market price for all the cards cratered. I wonder why?
You stopped playing because there are fakes? Was the game not fun?
At least someone is asking the right questions.
For many people not paying the artists is less fun, for nearly everyone paying 10x the price is not fun. Obviously a brillian game might overcome this but it can easily cause someone to move on.
This is a false dichotomy. You don't need to acquire the expensive cards to play the game. I enjoyed Star Wars: CCG back at the turn of the millennium even though I didn't have any Yoda, Vader, Luke, etc. cards. I think I had a Chewbacca, maybe? Yeah, I traded with a neighborhood kid for it, and later his mom called my mom to try to take back the trade.
right? Net Runner specifically allows proxy cards at events and even give you pdfs to print you own cards. Owning random expensive cards is no way to play a fair game.
I have a three Gaea's Cradles, been thinking about selling them and playing with proxies. Do you think now is the time? Especially with a possible recession/lay-offs?
A couple years back one of the original Pokemon TCG designers was outright printing off fakes of pre-release cards and peddling them with the help of a western company, and people only found out because they decoded printer patterns and found out they were printed with a recent printer.
It was this, right? https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...
And they were specifically graded as legitimate by a supposedly reputable grading company. I wonder what was the fallout from that.
I've seen Magic the Gathering fakes that are higher quality than the real cards.
A lot of the really expensive cards are also foils, which for the card stock they use for English cards ends up warping quite a bit over time. I knew multiple people who refused to buy foils ever because of this.
I used to be deep into the competitive MTG scene. It goes deeper than this. Everyone knew that foils caused warping, which would lead to different theories of the “best way” to foil your deck to get an edge, while also being plausibly deniable that you were essentially marking your deck with foils if someone called a judge on you.
At the high level MTG is as much about rules lawyering as it is about actual skilled play, if you’re curious to learn more about this aspect of the game go learn about the 1997 pro tour with Mike Long, who infamously took the win by mind games and causing his opponent to concede when Long had no path to victory.
I've only played at the lowest possible levels (at local card shops), so my experience is probably not super representative of the competitive scene. Pretty much everyone I played with was more concerned about keeping their cards in good condition than trying to angle-shoot their way to a free win (getting a few more bucks of store credit isn't enough motivation to ruin one's standing in what was essentially a social community).
I'm a bit more familiar with rules lawyering mostly because incidents where people got wins from it are somewhat common topics that people would bring up for fun. Someone might play a Griselbrand deck, and someone else would ask if they knew about the Borborygmos incident that led to the rule where naming a card doesn't require literally knowing the exact name, etc.
It’s a flex to have a fully foiled deck that you pull out once in a blue moon.
Happens to other collectibles too. There are some Games Workshop miniatures that are made in resin, and you can tell the clones appart because they use far better resin, which bends less. For some old plastic molds it's the same thing: You get much better cast out of bootlegs.
My bright idea is to build a ccg using rfid bus fare cards as the base.
You can get plastic NFC cards. I bet there are companies that will print and program them.
It must be possible to have flexible paper-like cards because my city has one-time tickets with NFC. Game would be nicer with card stock and not rigid plastic.
DropMix was an NFC DJing game that used RFID playing cards. It’s been done/could be done again.
You can program them with an app on your phone or Flipper Zero.
Altered attempted something similar. QR codes that add a digital copy to your digital collection. The physical card is just a proxy of the digital one. To enter tournaments or trade a card you have to own/trade the digital one. There was an official print service to order physical copies of the digital cards.
That's of zero benefit to actual game part tho.
And would have to use fancy ones as cheap ones have no security
...well unless you run official tournament and want people to stop using fakes there but that's more a thing Games Workshop would do for miniatures.
I dunno, you could build a "smart playmat" that keeps track of your board state and helps a bit with the math.
Fakes don't actually hurt the game. Just print out whatever cards you want and play with them, nobody is hurt and you don't pay usury prices to a company literaly printing money.
The idea is more for collecters, get something hard to clone that supports public key crypto like the more recent NXT miifare cards. Program them with a unique number and key each and you could do remote verification that someone holds the card in question. Registries of card location etc. hell if you are clever you could invent a little database and state machine to load on the card to store it's values and logic in electronic access form.
Fwiw, AI is going to turn everything to shit.
Is hardware safe? I mean the circuit has to be correct to work kind of thing. I know embedded people do use AI to reverse engineer things/go through a lot of logs. I have also heard about AI designed chips but seems you have more regulations to go through for selling the resulting hardware.
POT OF GREED