The Yak Shack Forum

I couldn't find anything about the case toppers for GOF, my question was did we ever determine how rare the Riddle Tombstone case topper is?

I only pulled 1 in 7 cases and as we know John only had 1 in his cases (right?).  It would almost seem that there is no more than 100 and maybe even a bit less. 

Correct, I got one Grave Yard Scene in 19 cases. I sold one I suppose it was a Dragon too. One was missing, see below.

I sent 2 cases to Australia and they were opened by the Aussie Agriculture Inspection folks. One case was opened from the top, the other from the bottom.
The one opened from the bottom did ok, but the one opened from the top was returned without the Case Topper envelope. It must have fallen out onto the floor. Since the cases were opened I wouldn't have attempted to re-sell them as factory sealed, so I opened boxes myself.

That sucks that they opened one of the cases and lost the friggin case topper, the one that I got from you had one of the dragon toppers. 

I can be so happy that i got one of each case topper in my 3 cases, this time i had really much luck. :)  In the last set (SS) i had 3 of the same.  :P

Wow that was lucky Thomas.

John why did those cases get returned from Oz?  Do you think it is fair to say there are less than 100 of these case toppers? 

I would even think less, but who knows.  That would make it one of the rarest of all the cards in the set, certainly undervalued.

I also was as lucky to get one of each in my cases!!  ;D

How many cases?  ::)

Three!  ;)

I got lucky enough to get a BIN on eBay for only $25 when the set first came out.

While it doesn't make up for the missing auto and film card from my case, I guess I should be glad I got the Riddle Grave case topper (if only because it looks the coolest of the three GoF case toppers  >:D)

Only thing is that i noticed this one tends to show more of the little marks the case toppers get because of the darker image. Although, it is pretty cool.  My fav is still the wanted poster from the orignal PoA though.

Only 1 in 7 cases for me. 

1 in 7
1 in 19
1 in 3
1 in 3

That is 4 in 32 cases, or an average of 1 in ever 8 cases.  600 cases divided by 8 is 75.  So 100 or less sounds about right to me.  wow, this card is way underpriced. 

I only had one case but got the dragon chasing Harry one.  I did pick one up on Ebay fairly cheaply though.  Maybe some clever person can work out a way of setting up a topic where all the owners on the Shack can register there card (without seperate posts).  That way we can see how many people on here have a Riddle Grave Card (just in case we have more than 100 ourselves  ;) ).

I think I got the best percentage: 1 case, 1 Riddle Graveyard scene.  ;D

Yeah,t hat was very lucky of you.

That would change my numbers to 1 in every 6.6 cases, or 90.9 cards for the 600 cases.

I finally got around to checking the reported breakdowns, and surprisingly the Flying Dragon is showing up "light" too.

Out of 26 specific cases (I think it has all/almost all of John's, but case-topper reporting was pretty spotty elsewhere. I saw box breakdowns from 50 cases, so I only noticed the case-topper for half of them):

14  Breathing Dragon
  7  Flying Dragon
  5  Graveyard

But the price guide shows 29 auctions for Breathing and 39 auctions for Flying, so I think we just don't have enough stats. There are 17 auctions for Graveyard, which would predict about 120 Graveyards in 600 cases. So there may have been a few more than 100 of them, but not many.  250/250/100 wouldn't surprise me, nor would 225/225/150.

I suspect that the reason that the Grave Yard Scene topper has had so many auctions is because it fetches a really good price.

I suspect that there are only 100 of them and 250 of each of the other two. Of course, Artbox never tells.

John

Or maybe 300 (Breathing Dragon), 200, 100. But i agree, there are not more than 100 of the Graveyard scene.

I agree that the target seems to have been 250/250/100. But if they tried to manufacture 20-30% extra for losses and damage, our calculations can be skewed by which sheets got scratched at the printer's.  ::)

As for auction numbers, it used to seem that many "medium high scarcity" items were held back for private sales. But now, I think virtually everybody goes to auctions first instead of to a favored dealer. The very highest demand items do indeed show up in auctions because "everybody is watching." There are more auctions for Rupert's auto than for the graveyard case-topper!

And maybe one reason Artbox never tells is that they don't want to interfere with our fun in trying to figure it all out ...

Did you all notice that this time none of the case toppers were listed on the check list card for GOF. On all of the other sets Artbox had listed CT1 and CT2 but never did list CT3 for any set.
I kind of liked the idea of the surprise CT3 card.

Hey Jeff, by the way, was that you who made it into the latest issue of NON-SPORT UPDATE?

Have a close look and you will see this issue is a regular who's who of Shackers and Card Talkers  ;D

Because only 42 people responded to the NSU survey, I think they worked hard to include a quote from most anybody who gave them any length of reply.

Next time I will give permission to correct my grammar.  ;D

Speaking of holding back, I think a lot of us are not spending any money. Have you all noticed that there are a lot of very nice variant auctions are ending with NO BIDS.
When the sets were current (HOT) some of these would have had a dozen or more bids on them.
I guess everyonr is keeping their money for the GOFU set. Not to mention the COS set. *GROANS* My poor wallet.