 They've done it again! Konami is selling another $1,000 card. Wait, what's that? It isn't $1,000? It's $1,300 this time? It's official. Konami has completely lost their minds. If you haven't heard, Konami just announced their newest product in the Masterpiece series, the Platinum Dark Magician. If that sentence doesn't make any sense to you, let me give you a little background. The Yu-Gi-Oh TCG Masterpiece series debuted in 2021 when Konami decided to sell a Blue Eyes Wide Dragon made of 99% silver for $1,000. For one card. This was big news at the time because Konami had never sold a product at such a high markup, especially not a single card. So this was like crazy. Everyone was freaking out. I made a video about it. It was really bad. I went back and watched it and I was like, I barely said anything for nine straight minutes. I like to think I've improved from those videos two years ago, but I'm doing, I'm doing my best guys, okay? But they sold that product directly to the consumer. They didn't use local stores and use distributors. So they completely cut out all of that and just went straight to the consumer, which was an interesting play. I mean, it just sounds like they wanted more money. And speaking of wanting more money, the Dark Magician has just been announced and is the newest addition to the series. There's only been two in the series. There's not much of a series, you know, two years. There's been two products and by products, I mean two cards. Here's what the actual announcement says about the product on their website. In 2023, a small number of duelists will level up their collection and style with the ultimate wizard in terms of attack and defense. Similar to the Yu-Gi-Oh Trading Card Game Masterpiece series, Platinum Blue Eyes, White Dragon released in 2021. The second release of the Yu-Gi-Oh Trading Card Game Masterpiece series will be a special Silver Dark Magician card. That was a mouthful. This unique, individually numbered, world premiere collectible is limited to 1,000 initial copies in North and Latin America. They said initial last time. We'll talk about that in a second. Made of 99.9% pure silver, burnished to a platinum colored finish and encased in a protective brick of acrylic at 1,300 USD each. These cards are not for everyone. They are certainly not for everyone. Orders will be limited to one per person per household. All sales are final. Once again, this Platinum card is limited to 1,000 initial copies. We said this previously in 2021. We said there's 1,000 initial copies. Oh no, what does that mean? Does that mean they're going to, you know, print more or something like that? They didn't actually do that. I didn't talk about it a lot in my previous video. Trading card game Masterpiece series. That's kind of cool sounding. So it's a series. I don't know what else we're going to get. Probably Dark Magician at some point. But it turns out, you know, there was nothing to really freak out about. At least not yet. I mean, they might do it later. But in that video, I did predict that the Dark Magician would be the next iteration in this series. So I guess I did something right in that video. Pat me on the back. Good job. The most interesting thing about this announcement was not that they had another iteration of this series because obviously a $1,000 card, they're printing money. I mean, it's 99% silver. But guess what? That's not worth $1,000. So they're basically printing an insane amount of profit by selling this because there's no distributors. There's no locals. I'm sure the cost is more significant than a cardboard card, but it is definitely not a thousand or $1,300. They decided $1,000 was not enough pure profit. They needed $1,300 of pure profit. What a weird number. You're already at the even 1,000. I mean, like it's an insane number anyway. Why do we got add on 30% on top of that? Is this the U.S. government? I'm not sure. I want you to just understand how crazy this price bump is. Not just like the fact that they were like, how, you know what? How about we just do $300 more? Let's do a little digging on the actual price. The original Masterpiece Blue Eyes was released in June of 2021. Does anybody remember what was happening in June of 2021? COVID boom. Cards were selling for prices that they had literally never sold for before. Here are some examples. Legend of Blue Eyes first edition PSA 10 packs. There were three sales of $1,925, $2,000, and $1,850. In 2023, these same packs have sales of $1,300 and then four sales of $1,000. In 2021, an unlimited Blue Eyes White Dragon, not just unlimited, a 2017 reprint sold for $2,125. An original print unlimited did have a little bit of a fade, so you got to factor that in. Sold for, wait for it, $5,555. Yeah, I said unlimited. Yeah, unlimited, $5,555. Anybody remember those times? COVID was nuts. And now I went back in search for PSA 10 unlimited prices and I was getting 2022 is the best I could get. So just a year later, now it's probably down even more, so keep that in mind. 2022, we had an original print unlimited sell for $1,913. That's an original print. Didn't have any fade to it, but still significantly less there. Then we had a Gymmit SGC, which is a fourth-grading company, which is fairly relevant. They do a lot of actual grading, so they're not like some tiny company. There was a PSA 10 reprint sold for $925. So it's not gonna be PSA premium, but only 900 bucks for the reprint 2017, versus the original 2000 and 2021. Then let's get a little MRD price point, a Mirror Force first-ed PSA 10 sold for $1,700 in 2021. I used this one because I personally sold one for $900 this year, so I know it's down almost 50% in the last two years. These 2021 cards was sold in peak market when the Masterpiece Blue Eyes was released for $1,000. Now in 2023, as we saw, we're in a market that's down about 50%. So obviously there's a little bit of a price difference when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh cards in 2023, but Konami got confused and said, hey, there's a price difference. Wait, the cards are not the same price as 2021 because they're more now, baby. Yeah, 1,300 bucks. How about that? Sound good, everybody? And everybody in the Konami boardroom's like, yeah, beautiful. That's just what I was thinking. Add more to it. Yeah, perfect. So basically Konami decided to increase a $1,000 MSRP product by 30% in a market down 50%. That's pretty insane. Now it all sounds completely ridiculous, but let's get to the question. Should you buy one? Or me? Or anybody? Should anybody buy one? Now, if I remember correctly, there was some weird stuff going on where there's like 1,000 in the Americas and like Latin America, North America, stuff like that. I think we had 1,000. I remember Europe had a separate release. I think they actually got to buy theirs ahead of time. I remember people trying to get people in Europe to buy one for them so they could like be guaranteed to have one and stuff. They had another 1,000. And I don't remember if there was maybe another 1,000 somewhere like, I don't remember if Asia got any or anything. So there's at least 2,000 copies out there for the platinum blue eyes. I don't know, maybe 3,000. And in 2021, we had concern that it was like, maybe they won't number them and then they could just do that reprint thing where they said it's like the initial copies. But they did end up like putting the numbers on them. I don't remember if we figured out if there's like a European difference. Like in the European one, if you have the one out of 1,000, is it so to say one out of 1,000 like the USA one? I'm not totally sure about that. So anybody can clarify, let me know in the comments. I'm expecting dark magician will be the same. There'll be 1,000 in North America, in Latin America, 1,000 Europe. And then if there was another 1,000, maybe in like Asia or something, then those will exist. And then of course they'll be numbered. Assuming it's the same as blue eyes, but who knows? So if you were to have bought the blue eyes two years ago in 2021, you would have spent 1,000 bucks, which is yeah, that's a lot. But what are they worth today? I checked some sales on eBay and they are actually selling for an average of about $2,000, which hey, 1,000 to 2,000. Guess what that is? That's a double. That's pretty good. About 50% per year, 100% over the last two years. I mean, you're not gonna get those returns on any sort of stock investing and certainly not in my Yu-Gi-Oh investment series. If you guys have seen that, go check it out, shameless plug. I also noticed during the price research that someone hilariously took one of these out of the case and graded it. They got a PSA eight and they actually lost value from the sealed thing. So that didn't go so well. What were you thinking? I don't know. If you're in the comments, let us know. What were you thinking? Now, 100% return is pretty awesome, especially when you compare it to most Yu-Gi-Oh cards that are down 50%. So if you think about that being up 100% versus down 50%, that's a pretty big swing. So Platinum Blue Eyes actually was a pretty decent investment. Nearly every card I own that I've had since 2021 is down like 50%. So if I had bought the Platinum Blue Eyes, which I didn't, I would actually have made money. So why did it make money exactly? Is it because of the 1,000 card limit, the manufactured $1,000 price point or simply because it's a good investment? There's really no way to know for sure. It could be none of those, could be all of those, could be a mixture of some of them. But you know what that means? We should be buying the Dark Magician, right? If we pay 1,300 bucks, we're definitely gonna have 2,600 bucks in 2025. That's what that means, 1,000 or 2,000. That means that if I buy this Dark Magician, it's guaranteed that I'm gonna have $2,600 in two years. Maybe, maybe not. First of all, I've already mentioned the market. That could be a good thing. Maybe if you buy this now and when the market goes crazy, this will go up a lot or maybe we're buying in at a significantly higher price point than we did last time, the 300 plus the, you know, the difference in the actual market. And then we have to consider that Blue Eyes is not the same card as Dark Magician. I gathered some examples of these iconic cards and compared their prices and here are the results. First of all, we have the PSA 10 Dark Magician from DDS, aka the Dark Duel Stories, RIP. Don't bring up when I try to open the Game Boy in the comments. Just pretend like that never happened. This PSA 10 goes for $3,400 approximately. All these are based on sales on eBay, by the way, so just keep that in mind. Then a Blue Eyes, White Dragon, DDS, Gem Mint recently sold at auction for $6,413.34. So that's about $3,000 more than the Dark Magician. Then if we want to visit the iconic Starter Decks, the Dark Magician first edition from Starter Deck, Yugi in PSA 10 goes for about $4,000. While the SDK, the Starter Deck, Kaiba Blue Eyes, White Dragon first edition PSA 10 goes for about $9,000. So that's over double the Dark Magician. And then finally, we have to bring up the LOB first edition versions. I was able to find an eBay sale of $8,000 for the Dark Magician in PSA 10 from LOB, and that's the first edition of course. The Blue Eyes I have not seen a sale recently, but the lowest sale I've heard of in the last two years was $30,000. So if we just go with that conservative 30,000 for the PSA 10, that's a significantly higher amount than the Dark Magician. So best case scenario, Dark Magician goes for about 50% of the Blue Eyes, and worst case, it's only 25 to 30%. So Konami's charging an extra $300 and a market down 50% for a card that usually goes for about 50% of the Blue Eyes. Now this is not every case, obviously, but these are significant versions of the card, and it shows that Dark Magician usually does not carry as much weight as the Blue Eyes White Dragon to most collectors and fans of Yu-Gi-Oh. This is not promising for the Platinum Dark Magician's future, in terms of value at least. And I think if you're buying a $1,300 card, you probably care about the value. I don't wanna hear from any of you guys in the comments who are not buying the card saying, yeah, but it shouldn't matter about the card. It's about the collecting. Look, yeah, yeah, you're right. It is about the collecting. But when you're spending $1,300 on a card, it's definitely about the value. It just is. You're spending $1,300, you don't want it to go down. I mean, that would just suck. You spend $1,300, it goes down to 500, nobody likes that feeling. Even if it's in your collection forever, it still sucks. But just for fun, and while I can't really know what's gonna happen with this card, and this is in no way financial advice for if you should go out and buy it or not, I'm going to have a little fun in an attempt to predict the card's future, or at least the price of the card. Starting off, everyone obviously has to pay $1,300 for the card. You can't buy it anywhere for less than 1,300 unless somebody buys it from Konami and then resells it for less, which obviously they're not gonna wanna do that, so that might be a while down the road before that's even possible. It may never be possible. Because the market is down, and this is a dark magician and a blue-eyes have already talked about this, I suspect that there's gonna be significantly less interest in this dark magician versus the blue eyes in 2021. Even during the massive hype for the blue eyes in 2021, even someone like myself didn't buy the blue eyes. Like, I am all in on this kind of stuff, like that's right up my alley, collector card, really expensive. You know, it's during the hype when, you know, you could have flipped it for like $2,000, $3,000, like immediately, which we didn't know at the time, so I couldn't like actually bank on that. But I didn't even buy it. So now that there's a lot less people speculating on Yu-Gi-Oh, collecting Yu-Gi-Oh, buying Yu-Gi-Oh, there's just gonna be less people interested in this card. And now there's also a markup. So obviously that's gonna deter some people. But I'm sure that a lot of people who do buy this are gonna instantly post this on eBay for like $5,000. I remember when the blue eyes came out, they were all like $5,000 to $10,000 minimum on eBay because people bought them and instantly listed them. There were so many listings, it just became a rat race lower and lower until eventually they got down, I think $3,000 was around when they started selling, which is triple your money, so that's a pretty good flip. Now, I will say before that happens, I would not recommend buying at any flipped price. I mean, let's say if they buy it for $1,300, flip it for $15,000, sure, that's not a big deal. But if they put it up for $5,000, just don't buy it at $5,000, there's gonna be a better price at some point. They're not gonna stay up at $5,000. I'm not gonna like predict the future or anything, but I am 99% sure it's gonna go lower than $5,000. So just hold your horses, probably should just buy it in the first place. Just buy the $1,300 version if you're thinking about buying it. But because the blue eyes ended up at about like $3,000 and then slowly fell down to $2,000 like we saw recently, which is still double your money, it's not bad. I'm expecting that this card probably doesn't even start selling until it's down to about $2,000 because of the dark magician less interest in all that stuff. I'm guessing that they go for around $1,500 to $2,000. A lot of people will buy these, attempt to post them up for $5,000, they won't get a sale, some will list it for $4,500, they'll list it for $4,000, it'll go all the way down to $3,000, $2,500, $2,000. And eventually some people will just want to move on from it, they'll want to sell it, make their money back and go buy something else. So I'm guessing some will sell for $1,500 to $2,000 and people will move on from it, you'll either get it and the initial $1,300, you'll buy from the flip at about, you know, $1,500 to $2,000 and it'll probably stay around there for the next couple of years. I'm not expecting this to really creep up unless there's some kind of crazy Yu-Gi-Oh boom which could potentially increase the price. But as I've said many times on this channel, I've told many people in DMs, there's no actual way to know what's gonna happen in the Yu-Gi-Oh market or any market in general. So let me know in the comments, what do you think about the platinum dark magician? Will you be buying one? I didn't buy the blue eyes and I'm probably gonna do the same for the dark magician. I wanna know what you guys are gonna do. Shout out to Tom Fosho, Dax or JT Show, Puffins of Doom, Ernesto Deanna, America Doytster, Supreme Sage 21, CJ, Leo Guine 62, another Thai show, Ian Moosa, Junior Barney, Mimic Gecko and Robert F. Thank you guys for supporting the channel and I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.