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Letagi

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Everything posted by Letagi

  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.
  16. Where is your friend getting the number 8 from? The first post in this topic? As noted in that section, that is only an approximation of the number that were in the collection from Binkmeister. Others have popped up in various places over the years. Quite a few former Lego employees seem to have them so I wouldn't be surprised if there are several dozen of this mask out there.
  17. He told me (or maybe it was in the item description) that he got the Komau from Lego HQ back in the day, so it's plausible that he could have gotten more than one. Unless he has succeeded in perfecting the art of Lego counterfeiting to a heretofore unprecedented level, the Komau I bought from him is genuine.
  18. Interesting, that's the same seller I bought mine from a few months ago. I guess he had more than one. Copper Komau prices are ridiculous, just a month or two ago they were selling for $100.
  19. That is actually quite reasonable compared with recent sales. I've seen a few go for $600-1000 over the past year which is utterly ridiculous. Maybe Bionicle collectors are tired of getting ripped off... I generally agree with this. The counterargument is that value is determined by supply and demand; if the supply is lower than the demand, then the value will rise to whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay. That argument is used to justify the prices of pieces like the pearl gold Kraahkan and Cloud City Boba Fett minifig. But the fact that there are four PGKs and 37 Boba Fetts on BrickLink right now (and most of them have been sitting there for weeks or months) kind of debunks that. If the demand were really higher than the supply, they would be selling as soon as they are listed. I could be wrong but I think the secondary Lego market is headed for a big crash. I simply don't see the absurd price inflation that happened over the pandemic being sustainable. Everyone who is willing to overpay for stuff will do so, and then sellers will realize that there is no one left to rip off and they will adjust their prices accordingly.
  20. For the record, I don't add every newly found alleged prototype to the rares topic. They have to look really convincing, as the five from Twitter do. In contrast, there's a guy on social media who claims to have several prototype masks and Krana that absolutely do not look convincing, so they are not in the topic (I briefly included them a while back before realizing I was being way too trusting and took them out). This is a good point here: I don't include rough-looking prototypes or that Hau made of a different plastic because, like Xboxtravis says, fakes would have similar qualities. I'm not accusing anyone in particular of selling fake prototypes, just agreeing that it is impossible to verify their authenticity. Just to add a healthy dose of skepticism - if someone did want to pass off a fake as a real prototype, the best way to do it would be to find a piece on that list that hasn't been seen before, make one, and then point to the list as evidence that it's real. I don't think that's what happened in the case of the Twitter masks because they look very real, but the list could potentially be abused in that way.
  21. That's good to know, thanks for telling us. In the future, if you (or anyone else reading this) want to buy a part for much more than it normally sells for, I would recommend contacting the seller and making an off-the-books purchase so there isn't a record of the sale (which is how I bought my brown Komau). Most sellers are open to this since it means they don't have to pay fees to eBay or BrickLink. You can still use PayPal G&S which has buyer protection built in, so there is no additional risk to you as a buyer. It would really help the rest of the Bionicle community to avoid inflating the costs of pieces.
  22. I've been wondering about that too. He could have "bought" his own mask to establish a sales record with the intent of relisting it under a different account. I suspect that something similar has happened with other pieces that have exploded in value recently, like the pearl gold Kraahkan and translucent orange Kraata. Gradual price increases are normal but those spikes do not look organic to me. Who's the guy with two of each?
  23. It was actually up there for a week or so. BrickLink's notification system is acting up again. I just happened to see it the day after it got posted. I made an offer for $1000 and the seller seemed open to it, but wanted to wait for a bit and see whether someone would buy it for his asking price. To my astonishment, someone did. For the record I think $3500 is ridiculous for any mask not made of a precious metal. I recently paid $1100 for a brown Komau which is about equally rare, and that's the upper end of what I think is reasonable. Hopefully this sale doesn't set a new precedent because it will price most collectors out of the market.
  24. Letagi

    I Did It

    The correct answer is buy another one and keep one sealed! Or, see if there's an open copy available on BrickLink for cheaper.
  25. I've been wanting to get a copy of the original WALL-E set for a while now. This morning a local independent Lego store got one in and I couldn't resist! The box is in absolutely mint condition, like it just came off the shelf - and it's staying that way! Won't be building him anytime soon, if ever. He was a bit pricey, but I traded in a few sealed sets that I had duplicates of to make the purchase more palatable. Now I need to get the new Brickheadz version!
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