Jump to content

Letagi

Premier Outstanding BZP Citizens
  • Posts

    2,083
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Other groups

Year 17

3 Followers

About Letagi

Profile Information

  • Location
    Canada

Recent Profile Visitors

5,908 profile views

Letagi's Achievements

Defender of Mata Nui

Defender of Mata Nui (139/293)

  1. $500-1000 is still feasible, just not consistently so. The prototype black Ruru went for $725, and two brown Komau have sold for $1100 each recently. It depends entirely on who is able to bid, and how high, at the time the item goes up for sale. Don't get me wrong, these new masks could very well go for a few thousand each at auction. There's just no guarantee, especially since the lack of provenance might cause some collectors to hesitate. Though I'll second that assurances from a Lego employee go a long way in that regard.
  2. You're right, I just found the auction post and it was 4500. Not sure why I remembered 2000.
  3. Deciding on a value for one-of-a-kind items is always tricky. Sometimes the numbers that people land on in auctions are almost unbelievably high, like $4500 for the light blue Kakama. On the other hand, sometimes items fall short of what one might expect; for instance, a one-of-a-kind prototype black Ruru sold for $725 at auction a few weeks ago. In general I consider $500-1000 to be sort of a fair benchmark for very rare masks, whether one-of-a-kind or few-of-a-kind. Then it's just a matter of who's in the market at the time and how high they're willing to go. Have you thought about what sort of format you might use to sell the masks?
  4. From what I understand there were only two Stage 5 in the lot that Will found.
  5. It's a rare piece, but not worth anything even remotely in the ballpark of 2K. Will Hafner gave out quite a few of them and traded me a full set of six. I don't know the exact number but there are lots out there.
  6. Too easy to fake a sale. List a rare item at a high price. If it doesn't sell, buy it yourself from another account to create a sales record. Post it again a couple months later, and justify your asking price using the sales record you created. Not going to name names, but I suspect that a few sellers do this regularly. Impossible to say with any certainty whether a particular sale is faked in this manner, but you can bet that some are. The white Huna was only up for a week or two if I recall correctly.
  7. VMKK are plastic with a chrome finish. If you took the finish off, you would have a GPKK. WMKK and SSKK are solid metal.
  8. Yes, they are. Yo-yo is personally responsible for the 400% price increase of the PGK. He has bought and sold several of them over the past two years. Sellers do exactly what you are saying they don't do - they buy all the supply of a piece that is uncommon but not terribly expensive, and then they sell their stock one at a time and control the market for that item. I've seen it happen in real time. One of these days I might do it myself just to prove it can be done. No, we're asking you to prevent sleazy sellers from engaging in market manipulation by artificially raising prices. Literally the opposite of market manipulation. There is nothing natural about Yo-yo buying a prototype for $3000 and flipping it for $5000 a week later. Guess that's just the market doing its thing, right? Yes, every time Lego releases a new version of a set. Desirable sets like the original UCS Millennium Falcon, UCS Star Destroyer, and the old Eiffel Tower used to be worth two to three times as much but plummeted after the new versions came out. Obviously there won't be a rerelease of Bionicle sets, but this shows that it is possible for prices to drop when buyers decide to spend their money elsewhere. I don't know if this will happen with Bionicle but I have a feeling that collectors are getting fed up with sellers ripping them off.
  9. I dunno, I think it could happen. Prices are approaching a level of absurdity that I don't think is sustainable. Eventually, everyone who is able/willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money on the pieces they want will have done so, and there will be no one left who can pay $1000 for a pearl gold Kraahkan. The market will stagnate and sellers will have to drop their prices significantly in order to break even. It's actually a version of the supply/demand argument, but reversed: when the supply of buyers is less than the sellers' demand, prices should drop. Yikes, that's very disturbing. It creates an environment where it's impossible to know what an item is really worth since you can't know know which sales are real. Especially frustrating given that I have been meticulously documenting collectible values for almost ten years, and now doing so is a complete waste of time lol.
  10. Totally agree with this. Much of the recent price hike is attributable to a handful of predatory scalpers. Set You Up/Yo_Yo_Flamingo and Bionicle Universe are the main culprits but there are others. Set You Up currently has a light gold Avohkii prototype listed for $5000, no doubt the same one that just sold on eBay for $3000. I suspect that sellers like him buy their own stock using duplicate accounts to establish a sales record, making people believe that certain items are worth a fortune, but I don't have proof of this. I get most frustrated when items that really aren't that rare become prohibitively expensive, like the pearl gold Kraahkan. There must be tens of thousands of them out there, if not more, and they are pretty much always available for sale. If I can buy multiples of an item with a few clicks, it's not rare. It extends way outside of Bionicle. There are currently 41 Cloud City Boba Fett minifigs on BrickLink and around a dozen more on eBay. Clearly not a rare figure, and yet the Lego Star Wars AFOL community has unanimously decided that it's worth thousands. Just a few years ago they sold for a couple hundred - still a lot for a mass-produced plastic minifig, but attainable for most collectors who want one. And as for the "demand is greater than supply" argument - if that were true, then every time one of these pieces gets listed, it would sell immediately. The demand for Cloud City Boba Fett minifigs is very obviously not greater than the supply. Pearl gold Kraahkan listings on BrickLink stay up for months. The perception of rarity in these cases has somehow been artificially created. Contrast this with something like an SSKK, which actually is rare and justifiably valuable. I really hope the bubble bursts soon. I won't have any empathy for the predators who are out thousands of dollars. As much as I like the idea that my collection is valuable, I like the idea of being able to buy all the rare pieces I want even more.
  11. My take on this is if you need a UV light to determine the variation, then the variations are not worth worrying about. But to each their own!
  12. WMKK are solid like Tohunga said, but you're correct that SSKK are all stamped Sterling on the back. If it tests as silver but isn't stamped it's a fake.
  13. I missed it, but if it was real I sure like the direction these prices are trending...
  14. The last one was sold by a guy in Poland. Doesn't mean it's not the same one though... Edit: It's been taken down and is not listed as sold. Maybe someone made an offer?
  15. BU is also notorious for selling "SSKKs" and "ZMKKs" which, in my opinion, are the fakest fakes I've ever seen. If one of the masks is fake, it would be his. I have it on good authority from someone who has had quite a bit of contact with the eBay seller that it is real.
×
×
  • Create New...