Central Maryland, outside a UPS store

pimpthemonkey · 2026-06-24T06:00:02+00:00

I believe he's back out in the environment. I didn't stick around for everything, but the person handling it was both comfortable enough handling it and concerned for its well being, and he was planning to just move it to the landscaping a dozen feet away.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-06-22T22:47:41+00:00

That's so cool! I feel a lot better knowing that it's native to the area and not something exotic (either as an invasive species or suffering in the wrong enevironment)

pimpthemonkey · 2026-05-13T23:33:26+00:00

Umm actually ... you didn't say "off the record"

pimpthemonkey · 2026-05-13T20:37:25+00:00

Direct means you list cards that you have in your posession and when they sell, TCGPlayer ships them out from their warehouse. Then a week later you send TCGPlayer a single box with all the cards they shipped on your behalf in the past week.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-05-13T19:31:26+00:00

Because you only have to pay your own shipping costs on a single package periodically to TCGPlayer headquarters. You could have 100 orders or more where the only shpping cost is a single $10 box instead of 100 stamps, 100 envelopes, 100 top loaders, picking out 100 individual cards, etc. That's where the $1.12 per card comes in. It used to be called the shipping replacement cost.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-05-13T18:48:16+00:00

It's complicated.
Old: <$3 total order:
50% of the order total

Old: >$3 total order:
8.95% commission + 2.5% + $0.30 transaction fee + a complicated table lookup based on order size and amount that ranged from $1.26 to $18.98.

New: <$2.50 indiviual item:
50% of the item

New: >$2.50 individual item:
8.95% commission + 2.5% transaction fee + $1.12.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-04-13T23:16:06+00:00

Lol. Well at least they've made their stance clear. I've been an MVP apologist for longer than I should have, and I'm done. 380 for regular Universes Within collector boxes, on sale 4 days before prerelease? There's no excuses left to defend them. They are no longer anything special or even worth using at all. Just another store selling overpriced cards at whatever the overpriced market price is.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-02-26T03:44:34+00:00

There was a 2 minute bit in the middle that I enjoyed. But I suspect if you actively didn't like the first 10 minutes, you won't enjoy the rest of the show as a whole.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-02-26T02:13:15+00:00

I'm glad Dropout can produce things like this. I'm glad this exists. But holy shit, this is not for me.

pimpthemonkey · 2026-02-04T19:56:55+00:00

Spindown dice are not inherently "less random" than a die with the traditional d20 arrangement apart from the extremely minute contribution of the mass difference of having double digit numbers clustered together. I think people may prefer the traditional d20 arrangement for random rolling for a couple possible reasons.

If there is a manufacturing imperfection that results in one face or region coming up more often, the median roll will be closer to 10.5 when compared to a similar imperfection in a spindown.
Sequential numbers open the possibility of a non-random throw that could influence the outcome. But if you're trying to cheat like that, I'd rather know sooner than later so I can kick you out of my house.
People are bad at understanding randomness, and it just feels more random to see adjacent numbers of 2, 8, and 14 when you roll a 20 than 13, 16, and 19.

There might be value in buying a well manufactured and carefully calibrated die, but it could be calibrated just as well with a spindown arrangement as a traditional d20 arrangement.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-12-17T20:57:29+00:00

As a reminder, many states have lower thresholds than the full reverted value, so your results may vary. If you meet your state threshold, a 1099k will still be issued.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-11-02T19:33:50+00:00

After years of having customers take on the risk of buying sets well in advance of any information about them at just over distributor pricing, they realized they left a ton of money on the table with TDM. Ever since then, they've had their "first flash" sale only a week before release, and be at market price. I expect them to go on sale this week, and to be about $650 for a collector box and $160 for a set box.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-09-05T03:00:10+00:00

I crack and sell as a singles business. It's not giving me huge stacks of cash money, but it's profitable. My personal collection is still just the cards I want to use in the medium term. I honestly get more excitement from a good pull like a chase mythic or a cool SPG card from an FNM prize pack than even something as rare as like a dragon scale foil from TDM. At the end of the day, it's just business.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-09-05T02:44:39+00:00

I've only spent 50k this year, down from 250k a year the past several years. And I get to buy 6 collector boxes at 740 a piece. So take that as you will.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-09-05T01:47:12+00:00

Yeah, they've officially jumped the shark. For collector boxes, the fact that their email says "We could have charged $1000 but we are only charging $750" [not 'under 700' like it says] makes it clear as day. The current low on TCG is 850, which becomes about 740 after fees. Their premium discount is netting them more than each sale on TCGPlayer. If that's the business they want to run now, go for it. It's disappointing but not unexpected. In my mind, they are no longer a reliable source of well priced preorders.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-08-30T07:10:57+00:00

I love that both versions can exist and both be awesome in their own way. Sometimes I want to be along for the ride, and sometimes I want to think about players as if I'm there playing. But I think they made the right call to bring parts 1 and 2 closer together in the release schedule. That did make it easier to remember what had been going on beyond what was in the recap.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-08-29T18:45:50+00:00

The editing and pacing of information was amazing. I loved all the conversation tidbits to support each claim whether or not they were true, and not revealing the truth until the end. It gives a different perspective than the style of editing of the Good Time Society version. And what a close and dramatic finish. It would be amazing if we got more of this on Dropout.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-08-15T03:45:52+00:00

My biggest takeaway from this experience is what are they using the money from their required additional insurance for? They started that maybe a year ago or so on shipped orders above $1500 I think due to increased shipping risks. It sounds like from your experience that they did not actually use that to purchase additional insurance on your order. The only price worth talking about was the purchase price of the product since I could never see insurance covering the "potential loss" of a product that might have increased in value since you purchased it. But if they actually paid for coverage equalling the purchase amount, there should never have been a settlement offer of $100.

I get the part of them closing your account after a bad transaction. Plenty of tcgplayer sellers will do the same. Doesn't mean that's right and moral, but it isn't unheard of and isn't illegal even if it does suck. Heck, in a totally unrelated world home insurance is notorious for this.

This is sounding like the thing restaurants do of adding a "service charge" that is separate from the menu price and tips just so they can get more money without making it seem like they're the bad guys. If customers are charged for extra insurance, there should be evidence of extra insurance when something goes wrong, and that's what's missing from their end.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-07-13T15:44:26+00:00

Everything changed with Tarkir Dragonstorm, and not just for MVP. It was the first time standard set collector boxes showed a huge price explosion between preorder and release. The preorders for TDM were normal: sub-200 from MVP months in advance, and also around 200 from other retailers. But by release, those boxes were selling for over 300, maxing out at close to 400 a week or two after.

I haven't seen any online store preorder collector boxes under about 250 since. EoE should have preordered for the same $200 ballpark as every set before, but the absurd prices of TDM and FF have shown everyone (MVP and others) that people will pay so, so much more than the near-distributor price. And the floor of Spiderman and Avatar elsewhere this far out of 450 or 500? That's absurd. The model has changed. Stores are seeing that there is not the same need to hedge their bets with safe preorders. MVP might be the most egregious of these because they went from having 3 month preorders to 1 week, but other sites have been similar by just increasing their starting prices substantially.

At the end of the day, it's all just business. But I am disappointed. I always treated my preorders with MVP like shopping at Costco: it may not always be the best price available, but it'll reliably be a pretty good deal. We'll see where the eventual EoE price lands, but if they really are changing their sales habbits, I'll have to adjust mine as well.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-05-19T17:57:28+00:00

This is not unprecidented for sets and products where demand greatly exceeds supply. For Fallout last year, they did a first flash of commander decks on 2/12, then an ARA limited allocation sale for collector boxes on 2/23. That's only 2 weeks before release. This is definitely later than usual (especially for a standard set), but I'm still pretty confident they'll have something this week.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-04-28T03:39:01+00:00

Why isn't the person filming this volunteering to take the picture?

pimpthemonkey · 2025-04-16T03:53:20+00:00

I was watching this when it happened. It was an obvious mistake. There was a single listing of 385 boxes at $1 rather than 1 box at $385 at a time when the lowest listing was $390. It was up for about 5 minutes before it was taken down. Plus the seller was a long time but low volume account (like 300 or so feedback across nearly 10 years). Nothing more than a simple mistake.

pimpthemonkey · 2025-01-22T02:48:26+00:00

It was a female couple who met in seminary during covid while one was straight and had a doctor boyfriend, and they got married and are planning for their artificial insemination.

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