Edit: I decided to put it up on eBay. I didn't get $400 for it, but I did get $250! Not bad for a $5 investment.
Enterplay, the company that produces the My Little Pony trading cards, held a series of flash sales during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend in 2013. Some of the sale items included stuff from the then soon-to-be-released My Little Pony Trading Card Game and special My Little Pony Dog Tags. But the real prize of these flash sales is the limited foil cards that are usually only available at conventions and during these flash sales. Enterplay only puts up around 25 of them at a time and they sell out within a minute, so getting an item is a matter of logging in beforehand, constantly refreshing your browser for 25-30 minutes, and being lucky enough to check out before everyone else once the item appears on the site.
I missed a couple of the sales just by virtue of not being in the right place at the right time. Then I logged in on time to see the item, but it was just a discount on a box of cards that I already had a copy of. But that was actually a decoy, and I had a customer come in and need help during the time when the actual foil card got placed on the site fifteen minutes later. I caught another sale, but it was a dog tag that I wasn't interested in. So for a variety of reasons it seemed like I was missing every good sale and getting there for the dud items.
For the final sale I resolved that nothing would distract me from my goal. People at work (yes, I was frantically trying to buy a My Little Pony card while sitting in my chair at work) seemed to have endless requests for me, and my computer really wanted to log me out of the Enterplay site, but I powered through and eventually I saw the new sale item pop up on the screen. I added it to my cart, hit the checkout button, and logged in to Paypal. The order went through! For five dollars I was able to order a Series 2 # f38 Applejack card.
Enterplay, the company that produces the My Little Pony trading cards, held a series of flash sales during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend in 2013. Some of the sale items included stuff from the then soon-to-be-released My Little Pony Trading Card Game and special My Little Pony Dog Tags. But the real prize of these flash sales is the limited foil cards that are usually only available at conventions and during these flash sales. Enterplay only puts up around 25 of them at a time and they sell out within a minute, so getting an item is a matter of logging in beforehand, constantly refreshing your browser for 25-30 minutes, and being lucky enough to check out before everyone else once the item appears on the site.
I missed a couple of the sales just by virtue of not being in the right place at the right time. Then I logged in on time to see the item, but it was just a discount on a box of cards that I already had a copy of. But that was actually a decoy, and I had a customer come in and need help during the time when the actual foil card got placed on the site fifteen minutes later. I caught another sale, but it was a dog tag that I wasn't interested in. So for a variety of reasons it seemed like I was missing every good sale and getting there for the dud items.
For the final sale I resolved that nothing would distract me from my goal. People at work (yes, I was frantically trying to buy a My Little Pony card while sitting in my chair at work) seemed to have endless requests for me, and my computer really wanted to log me out of the Enterplay site, but I powered through and eventually I saw the new sale item pop up on the screen. I added it to my cart, hit the checkout button, and logged in to Paypal. The order went through! For five dollars I was able to order a Series 2 # f38 Applejack card.
Then there was the waiting. I think it arrived at my house in early January, although I could be off by a couple of weeks on that estimate. I am not sure if I should keep it or sell it. Three copies of it have sold on eBay over the last two weeks, and they went for $161, $199, and $399.99. Four hundred dollars would buy me a lot of cards over the next couple of months. I could get the Fluttershy foil card and still have plenty left over for some 2014 Topps Archives Baseball, a Manute Bol autograph, and probably a few other things too. Hmmm...
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