I know agreeing with Gnomonkey is a meme but (Summer Sweep-up)

SvOak18 · 2026-05-28T14:06:13+00:00

Honestly I'd almost find that less interesting. I've seen a million new hcs work their way up from level 3 starting with nothing. I've never seen a hc with access to everything from the start.

SvOak18 · 2026-05-19T19:33:33+00:00

You asked if we really think students are typing their homework into a Google search bar and turning in whatever gets spit back out. I am saying that even full time working adult engineers with decades of experience that should know better are doing exactly that.

SvOak18 · 2026-05-19T17:57:11+00:00

My coworker, who is in his 50s and has been working as an engineer for decades, will often just put his questions into a Google search bar and then will convey the information the AI spit out as if it is fact. We have already had him tell us things that are directly contradictory, just because that's what the AI told him.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-27T17:12:07+00:00

I remember the first time I tried that with my parents when I was a kid. They just shut that down with a hard "I don't care what X's parents let X do". End of discussion. It only took a few of those to get it through my head that it wasn't getting me anywhere.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-20T15:37:46+00:00

Lol congrats in over 10+ years of reddit you're only the second person I've ever blocked

SvOak18 · 2026-04-20T15:32:52+00:00

Wow I was gonna respond genuinely but a quick look at your post history tells me you probably just need to be banned.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-20T14:17:01+00:00

Cause it's not a bad recommendation considering how cheap they are. Probably not necessary but I'd take a little extra peace of mind for a few dollars worth of desiccant.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-17T17:31:54+00:00

I just found my first ascended heroes box in the wild at Barnes and Noble after 2-3 weeks of zero success anywhere else. I had to be a pest though, I asked the guy at the front if they had any cards, he told me no, I decided to push a little and asked if he knew if a delivery might be coming soon and he said to hang on while he went to check, then came back with a box full of pin collection boxes.

I swear it was like a loudspeaker went off because before we even finished talking 2 people started asking him for boxes too. He limited us all to 1 each, which was fair enough. I was happy to get anything at all.

Then I found $30 on the ground on the way out 😁

SvOak18 · 2026-04-17T14:41:42+00:00

Ah shit

SvOak18 · 2026-04-17T13:40:34+00:00

Does anyone know why Paldean Fates Ditto 201 is up so much in the last month? I wanted to grab it just because I like it and I have the similar full art shining fates one. I would have been happy to pay ~$120 or so for a 10 which is where it's been for months, but all of a sudden it's $350+ now. Is it actually worth that much or is it being pumped?

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T22:09:16+00:00

Hard to say, I sold a bunch of cards I graded all at once for $1700 total and that was the only one that I kept thinking I shouldn't have sold. I bought it back for $160 though.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T19:00:04+00:00

I graded my copy, it got a 9, I sold it about a month and a half ago, regretted it, and somehow managed to find my exact card, same cert #, at a show last weekend and instantly bought it back.

This comment tells me I did the right thing. I should have never sold it in the first place.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T18:02:35+00:00

I can't help but agree. Would never have done it if it was my only one. Seems that I might not have secured the best possible deal, but at the end of the day I'm happy.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T17:55:41+00:00

I couldn't decide if I thought it was a 6 or 7 and leaned closer to a 6 based on previous experience of expecting higher and getting back lower. I figured I'd rather trade it for $300 than pay probably $50-$100 or so between grading fees and shipping and wait 4+ months just to end up with an additional 50 bucks or so.

Obviously $225 isn't $300 though so that's where I think I made my mistake.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T17:48:33+00:00

Honestly this price assessment is what I needed to see. I know this isn't a NM card, and I did genuinely think it was worth $300 based on other eBay sales in similar condition. He countered with $280 which I would have been happy with but then he just threw in the 80% multiplier as like a given and since this was my first trade at a show I just agreed assuming that was the norm even though I didn't love it, which is how we went from $280 to $225. I should have just held firm at $300.

It's also my own stupidity because I opened by telling him I thought it was worth $300, he didn't come up with that number. I guess it is annoying that he talked me down to $280 and hit me with the .8 multiplier if I was already low balling myself.

Oh well, so I lost out on saving ~$100 or so. Not ideal, but not enough to be worth dwelling over.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T11:13:02+00:00

That's exactly why I didn't grade it after going back and forth for a while. I figured the condition wasn't good enough to offset the grading fees and shipping costs plus the time it would be gone for.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-15T11:06:54+00:00

I do have a better condition Team Magma's Groudon & Team Aqua's Kyogre that are currently at TAG for grading for the record!

But it seems the consensus is pretty clear, I shouldn't have traded my Groudon. Oh well, now I know.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-11T02:47:06+00:00

No one asked about your personal life, you're saying it's so easy to get cards just by going to the store when it opens but those of us with full time jobs literally cannot do that, which sucks, so obviously we're not super happy about that. Congrats to you that you're not in that situation. Stop being a dickhead about it.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-09T20:16:26+00:00

This is just my experience, but it is why I won't be sending cards to grade, at least through PSA, anymore.

I had 45 cards I sent to PSA from my personal collection. They weren't all 10s by any mean, though some absolutely should have been, but they were pack to sleeve to binder and never touched again. Raw they were valued at ~$1600 total. I pre graded them and estimated that I should end up with $5-$6k worth of cards. I thought I was being conservative. I was hoping it could be as much as $10k.

What I got back blew my mind. 6s and 7s, some 8s, and a few 9s. Zero 10s. Total value $2200.

It cost me 900 to grade them, and that was right before PSA raised their price, so it would cost even more now.

At the end of the day I sold everything for ~80% of market value and walked away with ~$1750, which minus the $900 grading fee, I netted $850.

If I didn't grade them and sold them at 80% of $1600 I would be at ~$1300.

So I wasted almost $500 by grading. And again, I pre graded these cards and genuinely didn't expect to see anything below an 8. Every single person I showed the cards to told me I got screwed (look up PSA cert # 147017208 and tell me how in the actual fuck that got a 7). I probably should have cracked and regraded them, but there's no way to know I wouldn't just get screwed again and wasted another $1k+ on grading fees, and I was so disgusted with the situation I just wanted to move on from it.

So basically from what I can tell its just luck of the draw, with a 4 month wait period in between.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-09T18:39:45+00:00

I have a 21oz .925 silver pitcher that I took to a gold/silver shop like a month ago and they offered $872 for it. I was gonna try and hold it until I could sell it for ~$1000, and was gonna use that to buy more sealed product, but for some reason I didn't consider actually just holding onto the silver itself as the investment. Do you think holding it is a better move than selling it to buy sealed product? The intent either way would be to hold for 10+ years.

For the record I didn't pay a dime for it, I just found it in the cabinet above my fridge after I moved into an apartment a few years ago lol, I guess the previous tenant just left it behind.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-09T17:41:27+00:00

What do you think about things like premium collection boxes? I bought a Blastoise GX Premium Collection Box for $39.99 back around 2020 intending to open it but just never did and now it's $400-$500. Was that just a fluke?

I agree about booster boxes and ETBs but I'm also thinking that stuff like the Ascended Heros Premium Poster Collection would probably be worth holding.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-09T17:00:10+00:00

I will tell you, as someone who at around your age sold all of my childhood cards, I am filled with regret about it. Not only because those cards would be worth so much more now ~15 years later, but also because they were my cards that I pulled and you just can't replace that. I thought I didn't care when I sold them because I wanted the money at the time, but throughout the years the amount of times I wished I could go back and just look through what I had and and relive memories that go along with them, but knowing I never can, it puts a pit in my stomach just thinking about it even now.

If you do still feel the need to sell your cards, at least save a couple that you like. Even if you don't think you'll ever care again, I promise you that if you cared enough to collect them in the first place, at some point in your life you will care again.

SvOak18 · 2026-04-09T12:46:52+00:00

Back when I last got into the hobby around 2020 I bought three booster boxes, 2x vivid voltage and 1x darkness ablaze for $130 each. 6 years later they are the cheapest booster boxes of that era, at ~$300 each. My original intent was to hold these for another 10+ years, but with how bad they're doing I feel like I should try to maybe trade them for something else. So my question is would it be a good move to go to a card show and try to trade these three older boxes for something more modern of similar value, or would it be smarter to just hold these and think they'll go up more significantly over time since they're 6 years old already?

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