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Playing Card Chat ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ => Playing Card Plethora => Topic started by: CBJ on October 30, 2011, 12:31:01 PM
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so...
The Bicycle Trace decks have finished their first run on Ebay, and here is what they went for..
Red Trace - $50.01
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200665484795?ss ... 1438.l2649
Blue Trace - $46
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200665487170?ss ... 1438.l2649
Gold Trace - $61
http://www.ebay.com/itm/120796803067?ss ... 1438.l2649
Silver Trace - $72
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200665491744?ss ... 1438.l2649
$229 for a set.
Crazy.
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Merz is a genius.
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Those things are indescribably horrible. They're worth about $2.50. Crazy.
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He's an evil genius
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He's an evil genius
An evil, money-making genius.
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He's only a genius in comparison to the people buying this crap. Against a normal person, I can't imagine him being too bright.
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man this guy knows business. i know you guys want to say he is evil because of this but i actually give him props, i am not saying it was right to do (depends on were your morals are) I am just saying he put out crap and people bought it, thats how a business works. The guy created a crappy deck and dumb people bought it, all he did was use their stupidity to his gain. Anyone out there see all those T.V. ads? a lot of those things are dumb and not worth it, they make money from dumb people who want to buy them. So I say don't blame him and call him evil call the buyers stupid. I could take a pile of shit and say its rare( its mine no one else has) and say things to make it sound nice and charge what I want, if people are dumb and bid and bid its not my fault they are stupid I am just gaining from them. So hopefully this does not start an online argument but I say to Merz good job.
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I don't blame him. Yeah, he's a talentless reseller - but shouldn't we be looking at the insane people that bought them?
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I was on both sides of this. I think it's annoying how he keeps putting crap out, but even more annoying how much people are spending.
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wow... the same person bought them all
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wow... the same person bought them all
He's in for a hilarious surprise when he attempts to sell them for twice the price.
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i will love to see that happen, lol maybe he will end up giving them away, if they are free i will take one lol.
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wow... the same person bought them all
Something doesn't seem right though. The same person would bid on the same deck like 10 times in a row without anyone else bidding. Seems odd, doesn't it?
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im guessing it was merz trying to make people think the price was going up since it was "rare" and it had to have been at least 2 people, you cant raise a bid enless someone raises you right?
EDIT: just checked and the first one had 4 bidders.
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I usually don't buy off of eBay, but I'm pretty sure you can double bid, but I don't think the price will raise unless someone else bids.
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you can have auto bids like lets say its at 0.99 right now. im willing to pay 5.00 for it so I bid 5.00 for the moment it will be 1.00 once some one out bids me it will auto bid me back till it reaches 5.00
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Something doesn't seem right though. The same person would bid on the same deck like 10 times in a row without anyone else bidding. Seems odd, doesn't it?
That happens when a buyer sets a max bid higher than another buyers current bid.
Example.. you are selling a deck of cards.
Starting bid $1
I REALLY want it, and I set my max bid to $50.57
Every time another buyer bids lower than my max bid, I automatically beat that bid
and it shows that I'm bidding over and over against myself until a buyer beats my Max
Get it?
CBJ
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Oh, ok. That makes more sense.
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That happens when a buyer sets a max bid higher than another buyers current bid.
Example.. you are selling a deck of cards.
Starting bid $1
I REALLY want it, and I set my max bid to $50.57
Every time another buyer bids lower than my max bid, I automatically beat that bid
and it shows that I'm bidding over and over against myself until a buyer beats my Max
Get it?
CBJ
I never knew about this before. Thanks for the info.
Next time I bid I'll check how many people is bidding.
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That's just how auctions work.
BTW, I'm pretty sure it's totally justifiable to call him evil, exploitative and stupid and also call the buyers stupid as well; they're not mutually exclusive.
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That's just how auctions work.
BTW, I'm pretty sure it's totally justifiable to call him evil, exploitative and stupid and also call the buyers stupid as well; they're not mutually exclusive.
ok then dont ever sell something for more then it is worth or you or evil, every business man must be evil then. sorry im getting a bit hot headed on this one but i feel what he did was in no shape evil, yes it was unfair for him to put them up but that does not make him evil, he did not force people to buy them.
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Good business is where you sell things for what they are worth, not more than they're worth; that's what con men do. This was a blatant exploitation of the gullible, not a legitimate business decision. It's a con-job and in my eyes it's immoral and therefore evil.
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the people who bought got to determine the value of this thing. i would totally take something and place it at a high price and see if people bought it and took it higher, if no one did then I would lower. Its not like they are not getting something for their money, or not what they said they would get for it. all is fair there. but you know i could just be a con man then, i will just wait and see what others say.
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Come on; you can't say there's no subjective value to anything. The materials and workmanship taken to create those decks can be assigned a financial value and it is not in any way related to the price paid. If you take the view that anyone can assign any value to a product and let the market decide it's worth then only the richest would ever buy anything. There's a moral responsibility and a question of sustainable business relevant to appropriate pricing and there is no way you can argue that these decks were not designed to rip off the gullible. It is a con job, it is wrong, immoral and evil. It is not even intelligent; an intelligent man would make a good product and sell thousands of them to other, possibly more discerning, people. Only those who cannot create anything worth buying have to resort to these tactics.
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Well... Merz did it again...
He has now listed the 4 trace decks at "buy it now" prices of $49.95 PER DECK!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-Bicycle-GOLD-TRACE-Deck-Playing-Cards-Magic-Outline-3-D-Cube-Ace-Design-/120804421306?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c20812eba
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-Bicycle-SILVER-TRACE-Deck-Playing-Cards-Magic-Outline-Puppy-Paw-Ace-Design-/200670566453?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eb8e5d835
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-Bicycle-BLUE-TRACE-Deck-Playing-Cards-Magic-Outline-Distressed-Ace-Design-/190596100246?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c6069b096
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-Bicycle-RED-TRACE-Deck-Playing-Cards-Magic-Outline-Dotted-Ace-Design-/120804419664?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c20812850
Please, for the love of god, don't buy these at this price.
CBJ
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They're the same decks... I think the exact same decks. I guess he bid on his own products the last time round to make them seem valuable and then the buy it now is set just under what they allegedly went for at auction, trying to get people who bid on it last time to buy it outright so that it doesn't go above the $50 mark again. I'm pretty sure bidding on your own stuff is against eBay rules... I wonder if we could prove it and get him removed?
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no way to prove unless he admits it or you can track his accounts, also i had a friend who did it and im not for sure if it is illegal but i know its not right. also WTF with those jokers?
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Well if anyone cares... Merz has dropped the price of the Trace decks to 39.95 per deck
lol what a deal. only 160 for a set of 4
PASS!
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my family uses a thing called "auction Sentry" to bid. She puts the product number in and sets her highest bet and your good to go! It does your bet right at the end with like 2 seconds to go and it will make a siren noise to tell you that someone has done a higher bid than your highest. Its awesome
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I hear people going back and forth about Merz and his business practices. Is he foolish for selling decks costing a few bucks to make at outrageously inflated prices? Especially when they're almost completely devoid of art or originality? Perhaps. But to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi:
"Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"
No one forced anyone to bid on anything. I don't know what the asking price is, but people could just as easily have walked away and said, "thanks, but no thanks."
If he's bidding against his bidders, it's both immoral and against eBay policies - it could get him kicked off. The thing is, can you prove it?
I doubt that he won his own auctions and is reselling the exact same decks. Each picture of the tuck box displayed two decks - he therefore had more than one to sell of each.
Will his business practices make him a success over time? Another famous quote, often believed to be by P.T. Barnum but is actually attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
"You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time. (http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29299.html)"
There will always be the gullible who'll buy anything. But the majority of us who aren't gullible won't be fooled by his practices and won't buy up his expensive decks in the aftermarket. More people will see these once-expensive decks plummet in price/value over time and will stop buying them over time. Eventually his house of cards will either topple over or be propped up by just enough of the gullible to keep going. I don't see there being enough of the latter to allow him to thrive.
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I hate to pump this topic back up with Herbert West's Re-Animator serum, but what is this about?
While surfing eBay, I just happened upon these decks of cards. I'd never heard of them, so I googled the name. All the links are links to either Merz's eBay auctions, Amazon and this topic.
If I understand correctly, Merz had a whole bunch of these cards printed my Bicycle, and now sells them at an astronomical price to unsuspecting people thinking they're getting a good deal on 'rare' decks?
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I hate to pump this topic back up with Herbert West's Re-Animator serum, but what is this about?
While surfing eBay, I just happened upon these decks of cards. I'd never heard of them, so I googled the name. All the links are links to either Merz's eBay auctions, Amazon and this topic.
If I understand correctly, Merz had a whole bunch of these cards printed my Bicycle, and now sells them at an astronomical price to unsuspecting people thinking they're getting a good deal on 'rare' decks?
Yeah, that pretty much sums his business up in a nutshell. To my knowledge, Bill Merz is still the #1 customer in USPC's Custom Department, ordering all these weird deck designs made mostly of clip art found on the Internet or elsewhere. Then he pushes them off as "rare collectibles" on eBay, trying to drive up the price, and eventually they appear on his website - pretty much exclusively, since few people want anything to do with the majority of his custom-designed decks. But there are those collectors who have a compulsion to own any deck with the brand name "Bicycle" on it, no matter how horrible it actually is. As well as collectors who simply don't know any better. For a good while, he was one of my pet peeves around here with all the crap decks he was cranking out at record speeds. Now I mostly ignore anything he releases, beyond simply charting it on the NDR or the 2013 Releases topics.
His Internet store's not bad, if you ignore all the non-deck crap he's got up there, especially his "hillbilly" line of novelties. He has some hard-to-find stuff and the prices are usually quite competitive, but a few people have had beefs with how he packages things for shipping and his customer service or lack thereof. Personally, I've had no problems with it - made one or two orders, they arrived as described, no hassles.
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I hear people going back and forth about Merz and his business practices. Is he foolish for selling decks costing a few bucks to make at outrageously inflated prices? Especially when they're almost completely devoid of art or originality? Perhaps. But to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi:
"Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"
No one forced anyone to bid on anything. I don't know what the asking price is, but people could just as easily have walked away and said, "thanks, but no thanks."
If he's bidding against his bidders, it's both immoral and against eBay policies - it could get him kicked off. The thing is, can you prove it?
I doubt that he won his own auctions and is reselling the exact same decks. Each picture of the tuck box displayed two decks - he therefore had more than one to sell of each.
Will his business practices make him a success over time? Another famous quote, often believed to be by P.T. Barnum but is actually attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
"You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time. (http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29299.html)"
There will always be the gullible who'll buy anything. But the majority of us who aren't gullible won't be fooled by his practices and won't buy up his expensive decks in the aftermarket. More people will see these once-expensive decks plummet in price/value over time and will stop buying them over time. Eventually his house of cards will either topple over or be propped up by just enough of the gullible to keep going. I don't see there being enough of the latter to allow him to thrive.
There was a saying I heard. "Its only weird if it does not work" So in this sense, it works so go for it. But I won't support him.
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Its kind of funny, we have the same "Issues" on the site I belong to for my Zippo's. You can disagree with what he does, but Don's Obi-wan quote could not be truer. I think the problem in the last decade is that a lot of collectors are not collectors, they are speculators and most of the times don't have a clue about what they are speculating on, they're looking to make a buck, and that's why you read articles about a guy investing in Beanie Babies to put his kids through college and now is declaring bankruptcy and his kids have to work at McD's instead.
Is it wrong, for me, yes....can you blame him? Well, if Apple can put out a new iPhone every six months in a new color and millions flock to replace the perfectly good one they've owned for the last 6 months at full cost...can you really blame the little guy?
If you dislike his business practice you can do 2 things, one let people now, just as your doing here, and 2, don't support him.
Note: I see these decks are now selling with a $10.00 BIN
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Well, as if the trace decks weren't enough, he's hawking a set of (Merz-only) "Santa Maiden back" decks. They were $49.95 a pair (red/green and swapped), then $39.95 and now $29.95.
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Well, as if the trace decks weren't enough, he's hawking a set of (Merz-only) "Santa Maiden back" decks. They were $49.95 a pair (red/green and swapped), then $39.95 and now $29.95.
I saw those. Honestly, when I first started collecting (which was not very long ago, lol) I might have fallen for this. Overwhelmed with so many choices and sooo tempting to get something that's "rare"! Plus, I didn't know there were the original Santa backs and the Merz version.
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Basically, it's hard to genuinely say how rare his decks truly are. As far as worth, he always starts high, then lowers the price when he stops getting nibbles from the whales who like to throw money at things. Eventually they become available for "mere mortal" prices.
Honestly, I wouldn't pay dollar-store prices for his decks.
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*whew*.
Thanks Jay
I have been wondering where I could get so e of these for a while now.
Now that you posted the links, I now know.
.....
I mean I am still not going to buy this crap.
But at least I can sleep easy now that I know where I can if someone held a gun to my head and forced me.
On second thought....
I would probably let them shoot me.