During these dog days of summer, analyzing every little shift in the metagame is unlikely to gain you much of a financial advantage. Return to Ravnica is on the horizon, and most people are reluctant to trade their Innistrad block cards until they get a better sense of what’s to come.

In short, here’s what you need to know about the current state of Magic:

Standard has four very good decks: Zombies, Delver, G/R Aggro, and Naya Pod. Most of the cards that make up these decks will rotate, but the rare Zombies from Dark Ascension (Gravecrawler, Geralf’s Messenger, and Falkenrath Aristocrat) should be on your ‘buy’ list. Bonfire of the Damned and Restoration Angel are also going to be pillars of the post-rotation format, and I doubt anything will change that. Don’t rush to trade your copies of these away.

Thragtusk is in an event deck. This will lower the price, but not by as much as everyone seems to think. If you can get them in the $10 range by scaring people with reprint talk, you should.

Legacy is fairly wide open, and it is probably healthier than it’s been in two years. Seriously, check out the SCG Legacy Open lists—the format is great right now. At some point, people will catch on and these staples will get hot again.

The Scars lands are showing up a good amount in Modern, so don’t sell your playsets quite yet. The format has yet to take off in popularity, and with all the bannings it’s starting to resemble the old Extended, which basically makes it a graveyard for the best Standard decks of the last ten years. Right now, Affinity, Jund, and Delver seem to be among the top strategies, though a U/W Tron list also made Top 8 in Columbus. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker was also very hot on site. Modern season is still ramping up, though, and I expect a ton of innovation over the next few months.

That’s pretty much it.

For the rest of this article, I am going to focus on my personal experiences with an event that took place a decade and a half ago: the Beanie Baby bubble of the late 1990s.

There is a famous quote from writer/philosopher George Santayana that almost everyone misattributes to Winston Churchill: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I spend a lot of time delving up the past in this column, examining pricing trends and financial patterns from previous years in order to try and predict the future. Of course, the history of Magic finance is brief and only covers a small amount of what we should be talking about.

We act as though it isn’t shocking that a small square of mass-produced cardboard has value at all. These cards don’t help provide food, water, or shelter. They aren’t backed by a government or a bank. They don’t represent ownership in a manufacturing company. They have some intrinsic artistic value, but they aren’t antiques or masterworks of art.

I am not using this article to suggest that Magic values are going through the same kind of ‘fad’ pricing as Beanie Babies did in the late 1990s. Magic, after all, has thrived for more than a decade since the Beanie craze died Heck, Beanies were released in late 1993 along with Magic, meaning that it was theoretically possible to buy a pack of Beta and a (formerly) $2,500 Beanie Baby at MSRP during the same weekend.

Further, Magic has always had the advantage of being an enjoyable, ever-growing game that requires owning cards to play. If you want to compete in a GP or 3-0 your FNM, you need the cards. That will never change.

The appeal of Beanie Babies starts and stops at the collecting stage. Once you have them, you’re pretty much limited to displaying them in your home and bragging about your collection online. There was a community, sure, but it was mostly dedicated to ‘the next big score.’ Once the appeal of owning the dolls disappeared, so did all motivation for acquiring them.

That being said, there are certainly comparisons to be made between Beanie Babies then and Magic cards now.

For years, the only Magic cards that held value were the ones required to compete in high stakes Eternal format tournaments. If you wanted to win a Mox, you probably needed to own a couple already.

Now, as our community continues to gather strength, more and more value is being placed on cards that are foil, foreign, miscut, rare, or otherwise valuable for reasons other than tournament functionality.

Consider Commander, a format where a majority of the games are played on kitchen tables and unsanctioned events. Commander has caused the price of cards like Genesis to skyrocket from $1.50 to $12 in the span of a year and a half. 

At what point, then, might it become socially acceptable to print out 60 high-resolution proxies for your latest Commander deck (which will never see sanctioned play anyhow) instead of dropping over $1000 for the opportunity to own the actual cards?

It’s two things, mostly: the social/moral contract and the desire for authenticity. And these are the two things that power every collectibles market, game or otherwise.

Granted, both of these forces are powerful. I could print out a million copies of Mickey Mantle’s rookie card, but it wouldn’t stop the original from being worth thousands of dollars. And as someone who has far too much money tied up in foil Magic cards that I don’t ever plan on selling, I am not saying that I see a major fall coming for casual cards, foils, and rarities.

All I’m saying is that it’s worth taking a few minutes out of your day to hear some history and then think about how it might relate to your Magic card collection. After all, I think this growing fear is a big part of the reason why Wizards of the Coast clarified their position on counterfeit cards last year, even going so far as to talk about how they should be considered illegal in casual, unsanctioned play.

So today, we’re taking a trip back to the 1990s. Of course, I can’t tell the story of the Beanie Baby craze without first discussing how I got involved myself. In fact, the entire reason I am writing this column today is because of my own life-changing experience buying and selling Beanies as a kid.

Consider this my origin story.

Life in the Trenches

The hardest thing to do was to look busy. After all, I had been standing in the toy store for almost 45 minutes, and it was getting more difficult to justify my continued presence.

It was the summer of 1998, and I was still three months short of my thirteenth birthday. I was an early bloomer, six feet tall by the sixth grade and cursed with a mouth full of braces and a face marred by acne. While most of the toys I was looking at said ages 2-12 on the box, it was painfully obvious that I had long outgrown them. Puberty had taken its toll on me, and the innocent face of my childhood had held up about as well as the Maginot Line.

"Can I help you?" I was asked by one of the roving saleswomen for the third time in half an hour. I shook my head and kept pretending to browse the Playmobil section.

In under a minute, I felt a piercing set of eyes drilling into the back of my head. No doubt they belonged to a store detective tracking the most likely shoplifting suspect he had ever seen.

Then it happened.

One of the stock boys came out of the back room with two large, cardboard boxes, each emblazoned with the telltale red heart logo. By the time he reached the front of the store, three dozen middle-aged women had descended upon him.

They were quick.

I was quicker.

My hands were the first into the box after it was opened. "Only two of each to a customer," I heard, a request that in no way stopped me from filling my basket with four of each design.

The nerves in my hands twitched when I got to the bottom of the second box. There, sealed behind a thin sheet of plastic, were sixteen stuffed white ghosts. These hadn’t been seen in retail stores since the previous Halloween and fetched an easy $50 each on the secondary market.

I tried to grab four of the ghosts, but one of them was forcibly yanked from my hands. By the time I looked up to see who had taken it from me, the rest of the pile was gone. No matter—I had three of them still, along with four cats, four fish, a duck, and a sea otter that had been retired a couple of months earlier.

I went back to my mom who was waiting at the periphery of the scrum. She had somehow managed to get two of the ghosts herself—I’ll never know quite how—which meant that we were one over the limit regardless. In order to buy the fifth ghost, she would have to hide it somewhere in the back, then go to the car and change into a different shirt and hat.

Such was life on a Beanie Baby run.

Once the treasures had been loaded into the back of our car, I opened the small floral-print phone book that we used to track shipments and made another notation. "UPS should be about done with Acton," I said. "This is generally their last stop. But The Paper Store in Groton usually put their shipments out right away, and if we hurry we can make it."

"Sounds good," my mom said, turning on the car and pulling out of the strip mall. "They might have gotten a bag of ghosts in too. That type of allocation is generally regional."

She was right. By the end of the week, we had over a dozen copies of Spooky the Ghost.

Buy price? $5 each. Sell price? $50 each.

It was the summer of 1998, and the world had gone mad.

Not-So-Humble Beginnings

I’ve touched on it in previous articles, but I don’t think I’ve ever fully conveyed how obsessed I was with comic books for most of my childhood.

During summer vacations in the early 90s, my bed had a long, cardboard box of comic books permanently squatting on one side of it. The other side had a giant, messy pile of comics that I had already finished reading. When I got to the end, I scooped up all the comics from the floor, shoveled them back into the box, and started anew.

My obsession with comics started around the time my family moved from Northern California to rural New England, shattering my already miniscule social sphere. I was a weird kid who didn’t make friends easily, and the move was especially rough on me.

Unlike most of the other people I know who were obsessed with comic books at the same time, I never really got into the superheroes. Caped crusaders didn’t start appealing to me until much later, years after I discovered Star Wars and a whole nerdy world opened up to me. In my early childhood, my absolute favorite comic books were about the life and times of Scrooge McDuck.

There were several reasons, I think, why Scrooge appealed to me so much more than Superman.

One is that it’s VERY hard to get into superhero comics when you buy most of your comics at yard sales. Most good Marvel and DC stories take multiple issues to play things out, so getting issue #171 of Amazing Spider-Man from 1982 is a useless experience.

Another is that Carl Barks and Don Rosa, the two most prolific Scrooge writers, drew from classic literature, fantasy, sci-fi, and their outstanding imaginations in order to tell well-crafted adventure stories that stood the test of time. These comics hold up well, and their complex, interesting stories still hold sway with me.

Most importantly, though, Scrooge comics appealed to my nascent desire for a successful and secure life. Unlike his namesake from Dickensian literature, the Disney version of Scrooge is only a miser to those who threaten his family. He values an adventurous spirit, the love of a few close friends and family, and making money in whatever way he can. He is the ultimate embodiment of the American dream: an immigrant who has built up his fortune from the ground and uses it to ensure that he can live the life he wants. (Which, as far as I can tell, mostly involves poking around tombs and looking for treasure with his bumbling nephew.)

Scrooge taught me the value of an entrepreneurial spirit from a very early age, and the fact that making money meant I could buy more comic books pretty much sealed the deal. Capitalism was the life for me, I had decided, and began to look for new and interesting ways to make a buck. In the third grade, I bought a box of glass telephone insulators—these cool looking things—at a yard sale. The following week, I brought some in to show and tell at school and tried to flip them to my classmates. Even though most of my nine-year-old school chums were appropriately baffled, I kept at it until a teacher told me that kids selling things at school was prohibited.

At the same time, my mom was looking for ways to reintegrate herself into society.

My father had worked his way up into an income that paid for our middle class life in suburban San Jose: a near-impossibility in today’s economy, but merely a lucky break for a talented software engineer living in Silicon Valley during the late 1980s. My mom stayed home to raise me and my younger sister, a sacrifice that I am eternally grateful for.

By the mid 90s, though, both my sister and I were in grade school and my mom had vast swaths of time during the middle of the day when no parenting was necessary. Stuck in a large exburban home, she decided to find a vocation that would generate additional income for our family while allowing her to still be there when my sister and I came home from school.

The advent of the Internet gave her the outlet that she needed.

Thanks to eBay and the then-popular Yahoo Auctions, it was suddenly possible for regular folk to engage in arbitrage between differing local antiques and collectibles markets.

For example, there aren’t many collectibles in California older than about 1920. Before that, there just weren’t too many people living out west. Thus, antique china, linens, and other Depression-era-and-earlier collectibles commanded a much higher value in Santa Monica than in Boston.

For several years in the mid-90s, it was possible to go to yard sales throughout New England, buy up anything desirable, and make money on it by putting it up on eBay and selling it to folks out west. Until the regional prices evened out, selling any decent antique out of New England guaranteed you a pretty decent profit. Before long, she started learning which antiques were truly undervalued.

And that’s where things got really fun.

As a fledgling capitalist, I loved everything about the business. I tagged along nearly every weekend morning, buying comic books and honing my bargaining skills on yard sale tarps and at flea market tables. Before too long, I began picking up an eye for antiques. My specialty was glassware, china, and pottery. I could spot a piece of Roseville from fifty yards, and I knew the difference between a piece of ‘blue willow’ china and the older and more lucrative ‘flow blue.’ I knew Blue Ridge, Fiesta, and Anchor Hocking on sight. I knew a real McCoy from an impostor even though most of the early pieces by McCoy were unlabeled.

Before long, we started going to a flea market every Sunday morning in addition to the Saturday yard sales. There, we found a vibrant culture of local boys and mountain men who called themselves ‘pickers.’

There’s no way to truly do justice to all of the amazing people that liked to frequent the same flea market at 6 AM every week, but I’ll do my best.

One of the most memorable was a snaggletoothed gentleman in his late forties who was as flamboyant as it’s possible for a man wearing a dirt-caked flannel shirt to be. We called him ‘Telephone Guy’ because that was all he ever bought. Every week he’d manically run around to each individual dealer before they finished unpacking and ask them if they had any old telephones. If they said yes, he’d stick to them like glue and yammer away at them until they managed to dig out the phone in question. Then he’d berate them for having such a blatantly terrible and overpriced phone for sale. After ten minutes of that, he’d make them a lowball offer which they would immediately accept in order to get rid of him.

Telephone Guy claimed to have many careers away from the flea market, each more lucrative and outrageous than the last. In later days, though, he began to admit what we had suspected all along—that his day job involved doing manual labor for a landscaping company. Through it all, he never backed off his twin claims of a wealthy and beautiful girlfriend in New York City who would fly him down to see her on her private jet and a collection of telephones that the Smithsonian has demanded they be given upon his death.

There were dozens of other pickers too, most of which had their own unique specialty: vinyl records, old books, military items, quilts, sports collectibles, even broken toys in one sad case. There was a mentally challenged man with a black bushy beard and wild blue eyes who spent his disability checks on beat up toys that he stuffed in the bed of his Toyota pickup. He had one of those hard top covers that go over a truck bed, only one of his the windows were all blown out and covered with a tarp. He’d spend the early part of every Sunday morning hunting toys, and then around eleven he’d go back to his truck and spread the tarp out on the grass. Then he’d dump a bunch of toys out and try to sell them.

On his best days, he was a truly sweet man. I remember once talking to him for a long time about how much he loved Scooby Doo. One weekend he heard that there was going to be a Scooby Doo marathon, and he was scared to miss a single episode. He went to a thrift store and bought SEVEN separate TVs and VCRs, all set to record as much Scooby Doo as possible.

On other days, when the weather was hot and his cocktail of medicines wasn’t working so well, he’d teeter on the edge of violence. More than once I saw him throw toys at people in frustration. More often, though, he’d just take his rage out at the toys themselves. I suspect that’s how most of his wares got broken.

Most of the pickers weren’t quite so sad, of course. Many of them were good, honest folk with a love of collecting and a desire to make a living based solely on their ability to hustle up a buck. This was Yankee ingenuity at its finest, and I learned a lot of valuable lessons from that motley crew of rogue dealers. Those of us who were there every week shared a real sense of brotherhood, and more than one of them took me under their wing to teach me a little about their own little specialties.

Of course, the fraternity only lasted until there was a buck to be made. About two-thirds of the booths at the flea market were there every week, and they were mostly manned by pickers who did the same thing we did—buying at yard sales on Saturday and taking their goods to market on Sunday. The other third was made up of ‘civilians’ who rented a stall for a week in lieu of having a yard sale and professionals who set up occasionally to get rid of the excess product from their store or auction business. These were the people who had what we all wanted.

The flea market itself covered about six football fields’ worth of area spread out on both sides of a major country road. When someone good showed up—a would-be garage sailor with no sense of what his things were worth, for example—there would be a ‘feeding frenzy’ as all the regulars would try to muscle each other out of the way in an effort to get as many of the good items as possible.  

I got into my one and only physical fight at one of these feeding frenzies. I was twelve or thirteen, but I was big for my age and easy to mistake for someone older. I don’t know what I did to provoke the middle-aged dude that came at me, only that I was looking through a pile of junk one moment and was flat on my ass the next. I popped back up, only to immediately get shoved down again. I came up swinging the second time, and landed what was probably a pretty wimpy blow before someone separated us.

Picking can be serious business.

Through it all, my mother and I never set up our own booth at the flea market. The regulars assumed she had a consignment shop somewhere, and the idea that anyone would sell antiques on the computer was totally foreign to them.

Beanie Babies, however, were a different story.

The Stand

In the days before online shopping was universally accepted, the only people who used sites like eBay were nerds and obsessive collectors. Online auctions made sense to the caste of people who were known at the time as ‘computer geeks,’ and collectors chose to learn the interface because it revolutionized their ability to buy rare items.

Before eBay, hardcore collectors had to hope things showed up at their local shop or that they could afford to travel to a convention that year. In 1998, then, it didn’t make much sense to sell relatively common things online.

The sort of collectors who were buying Beanie Babies online only wanted the hardest-to-find dolls. The crown jewel of Beanies at the time were the ‘original nine’—the first nine beanies the company ever released:

At the time, first generation copies of these dolls were worth upwards of a thousand dollars each. In mint condition, a set of original nine Beanies would have likely brought over fifteen thousand dollars at auction.

The interesting thing, of course, is that many of you probably had Beanies at home that looked just like those. That’s because Beanie production runs were measured in ‘generations,’ with each generation shift noted by a change in the design of the tag. Every Beanie has two tags: a ‘hang tag,’ which is the red paper one shaped like a heart, and a ‘tush tag,’ which is the little cloth one sewed to the animal’s butt or leg. It was only the tags that separated a $5 lobster toy from a $1,000 one.

The most expensive Beanie Baby ever printed was actually a misprint. In the very first production run for Peanut the elephant, the fabric was dyed dark blue instead of the more sensible gray you find on most elephants. "Dark Blue Peanut," as he was known, sold for $2,500 at MINIMUM. For a stuffed toy elephant.

I only ever saw one Dark Blue Peanut in my life, and we’ll get to that story a bit later.

Of course, if you wanted to open a website that sold Magic cards, you probably wouldn’t just deal in blue Hurricanes or pieces of the Power 9. There’s far more profit to be made dealing in cards with a greater volume of interest and availability. And in 1998, all the easy money was still in meatspace.

It wasn’t hard to see that there was money to be made in Beanies. Their MSRP was $5, but most stores were perpetually sold out of anything that wasn’t one of the ten or fifteen most common styles at any given time. People stalked UPS trucks waiting for shipments to come in, and the newest or hardest to find Beanies were snapped up within seconds. For months after a new doll came out, they maintained a healthy secondary market value between $10 and $15.

Even more lucrative were ‘retired’ Beanies. Every three months or so, Ty announced which models they were adding to their production line as a new release and which were getting ‘retired.’ They did this deliberately to increase the hype on whichever dolls had flagging sales that month, and it worked wonders. Retired Beanies would jump from their $5 retail basement to $30+ upon announcement. Beanies that were retired before the dolls became a phenomenon were worth between $50 and $1000. A set of solid colored teddy bears sold for over $500 each, while a trio of tie-died dinosaurs went for $250-$400 apiece.

At some point in 1999, someone actually opened up a retail shop in my hometown entirely dedicated to Beanie Babes. They had no retail contract with the manufacturer; they simply bought them on the secondary market and attempted to resell them on the, uh, higher end secondary market. Somehow they managed to stay open for two full years. I have no idea if they ever turned a profit.

In retrospect, opening up a flea market booth in which to sell Beanies was a masterstroke.

For a very reasonable booth fee, we were given access to an eight-hour weekly window in which thousands of potential customers—right in our target demographic!—would walk by our table and immediately have access to nearly every rare Beanie ever produced. While our display boxes with the $100+ Beanies drew the most attention, our biggest sellers were regular ‘bulk’ Beanies that we sold for $7-$8 each. There was nothing special about these Beanies; we picked them up at $5 retail at gift shops and flipped the immediately for an extra $2-$3 that people were more than happy to pay in order to have access to a bigger selection. On a given Sunday at the height of our business, we would sell upwards of fifty lower end Beanies.

Of course, getting to that point took time.

We started our business as a trial run, setting up shop on the side of a booth run by one of our dealer friends: an old woman who never sold all that much and seemed to be there only to kill time and talk to people on Sunday mornings. We’d start each week with thirty or forty Beanies, and by the end of the day we’d be down to eight or ten. Sometimes I’d leave the stand and spend most of the morning scouting, looking for other dealers selling beanies at lower prices. Then I’d either buy them out or take the information back so that we could lower our prices and remain competitive.

I was very impatient in those first few months. I had purchased a stuffed cow—one of the very first Beanies ever produced—with second generation tags. It was worth around $50, but very few people were interested because you could still buy the doll with its current 4th edition markings at MSRP. I kept marking it down in price, sometimes hour by hour, while my mom told me to be patient and wait for the right buyer. I ended up selling it to another speculator for $20—only $5 more than I had paid—just to get rid of it.

The following week, Ty announced that they were retiring the cow. The price—especially on the older versions—doubled overnight. I remember being really upset at myself, but the lesson was well learned.

As our inventory continued to grow, we moved into our very own spot. In order to feed our growing demand, we had to make Beanie runs almost every single day.

The local chain that got in the most frequent shipments was a place called The Paper Store, which were basically just Hallmark stores with a different name. There were eight or nine of these within a thirty mile radius of my house, and until we figured out the delivery schedules we would call each one every day and ask when they were expecting to get in their next order of Beanies. You didn’t always have to be there right when they hit the floor, but being even an hour late would mean that only the most common dolls would be left.

We also began exploring other creative options for Beanie acquisition. When the Princess Diana memorial bear was released after her death, the original print run was only available in the UK. While we were unable to get any of the original numbered run of 450 —Beanies that are still ‘worth’ many thousands of dollars each—we did secure several from the second print run that were actually mailed to use from the gift shop at Buckingham Palace.

Other big sellers for us were the Teenie Beanies. In late 1996, McDonalds released ten miniature versions of popular Beanie Babies as Happy Meal toys. Because the craze had only intensified by the summer of 1998, they decided to release a second series featuring ten new designs. You can imagine how long these lasted at most McDonalds restaurants.

We were ready for them. At 6 AM on the first day of the promotion, our car was first in the drive-thru line at our local McDonalds.

"I’ll have…do you have a breakfast version of a Happy Meal?" My mom asked through the intercom.

"Yeah, we have a breakfast meal with a toy," came the muffled reply.

"Great," she went on. "I’ll take thirty five of them."

We ended up with several hundred Happy Meals that day. At the first few restaurants, we kept the food and tried to freeze the cheeseburgers—there were dozens filling up our freezer for the next several months. By the end, though, we were either telling the restaurants to keep the food or handing them out to hungry people outside the restaurant. I discovered quite quickly that even though I had long dreamed of having access to infinite McDonalds hamburgers, the maximum amount anyone could ever want in a given weekend is about eight. I couldn’t so much look at one for the next year and a half after that.

The Teenies sold well, though. We paid under $3 for each meal, and we got around $8 for them at the stand. It took almost a full year from the start of the promotion, but by the end we had sold every last one.

We supplemented our stock by exploring avenues for used Beanies as well. Over a period of several months, I called nearly everyone in my middle school phone book and asked them if they had any older Beanies lying around that they might be interested in selling to me. I explained that some of them were worth a couple hundred dollars each, so it was likely worth their time to check. Everyone knew that Beanies had value, but much like Magic collections today, very few people wanted to take the time to figure out if theirs were particularly expensive. I remember getting a couple of bears from a kid who was kind of a jerk for $50 each (an INSANE amount of money for a middle schooler!) and flipping them for several times that a couple of weeks later.

At one point, my school ran a charity drive where students and their parents could donate old Beanies that would be given to children in need. After spotting a few highly desirable retired dolls in the bin, I persuaded the teacher who ran the program into letting me take some of the more expensive Beanies in exchange for a gigantic number of more common dolls. I believe we ended up taking about ten or fifteen Beanies and giving back over a hundred. We didn’t make a profit, of course, but we helped that charity as much as we could.

After all, it was that school that had led us so deep down the Beanie business path to begin with.

While the online antiques and collectables business had been a good way for my mom to keep busy and still raise a family, it was only lucrative up to a point. As more business moved online and eBay rose in popularity, finding killer deals at yard sales became considerably more difficult. And money became a major issue in my family once my parents decided to enroll me in private school starting in the sixth grade.

I’ve since asked my parents why they made the decision to send me to a school they couldn’t really afford, and they told me that they couldn’t bear watching my love for learning die in a public school classroom.

To be fair, the public school system where we lived was actually pretty good. My sister attended that school from kindergarten through the end of high school (except for a one-year stint at a private school that she didn’t care for), and she just got accepted to a top ten law school. But whatever she got out of that education was totally lost on me. By fourth grade, I had discovered that I could do absolutely nothing in class and still get A’s and B’s. So my parents, being the proactive, nurturing, and wonderful people that they are, moved me to a school where I would be properly challenged. I still remember the tremendous jolt I felt when I got my first paper back at the new school and it had a giant red C-minus on it. After freaking out for an evening, I realized that I had entered a whole different world and my outlook would have to change.

While I struggled with academics, my parents were struggling to make ends meet. Tuition at my new school was $15,000 a year, which was an even bigger number then than it is now. While my dad started in on his second decade working nine to five, my mom did some math and realized that she could cover the tuition bill herself each month while still only working from home part-time.

And she did. For three straight years until my dad was able to get a raise, my mom covered the tuition bill every single month with Beanie Baby money. For my part I was allowed to sell a couple of Beanies on the side in order to have a small ‘salary,’ but the rest of the money I helped make went right into tuition fees. And because I loved the work as much as I loved my new school, I didn’t complain.

Even more than that, I was proud. I helped a business develop from humble beginnings on the side of someone else’s flea market table into an online juggernaut that did thousands of dollars worth of business each week. I learned about economics, the rules of supply and demand, and how to make a sale. For the first time, I felt like a productive member of society.

And you can’t put a price on that.

Evolution

As 1997 rolled into 1998, it became necessary to radically restructure our business.

Ty had begun introducing other product lines, like the larger, more expensive ‘Beanie Buddies’ as well as ramping up their schedule of retirement and release announcements.

With more Beanies came more shipments, and supply gradually began to meet demand. Rare Beanies still sold well, but we saw a huge dip in interest for our lower end dolls.

It was the beginning of the end, and we knew it.

By this point, other companies had stepped in to try and get in on the Beanie Baby craze. Most failed to capture the magic that made Beanies ‘work,’ but one company was quite successful: Disney.

At this point, Disney collectors were a rabid and devoted bunch. And as luck would have it, there was quite a lot of overlap between the (mostly middle-aged, mostly female) target demographic for both Beanie Babies and Disney collectables. So when Disney released a line of limited edition plush dolls, many of the Beanie collectors made the leap.

Unlike Ty products, however, Disney Beanies could only be purchased in one place: The Disney Store. And because Disney Stores will ship products nationwide, acquiring Disney Beanies from all over the country was a real possibility. On shipment days, we would pull up a list of every Disney store in the US and call them all, hitting each one right as they opened in their time zone. Because many of the Disney Beanies had a severely limited allocation, it was important to be the first one to get them as they hit the shelves. Often, we had to call back several times in a morning to get the right person right when they went out.

When the Nutty Professor remake came out, Disney released a very limited number of ‘talking’ Flubber Beanies that had a little voice box inside of them that made sounds when you smacked it. We spent an entire day rounding up more than a hundred of them from all over the country, and sold most of them for five times what we paid over the next few years.

There were also several Disney Beanies that were ‘park exclusive,’ meaning you could only buy them from Disney Stores inside Walt Disney World, Disneyland, or Euro Disney.

On multiple occasions, we convinced Disney Store employees at each park to mail them to us. We would tell them (on the phone!) about how we were enjoying our stay, and how we just wanted to make sure we didn’t have to bring the dolls home with us on the plane. They didn’t go for it every time, but it worked more often than you’d think.

We also moved our business online, setting up a website that was, at the time, the definitive resource for Disney Beanie collecting. This enabled us to find a whole network of buyers and sellers as well as to influence demand in the marketplace. It was a smaller world then, especially online, and one small site like ours could shape quite a few opinions.

As ‘Beanie Baby experts,’ we also started a side business appraising collections for insurance purposes. For a flat rate, we would make house calls to evaluate collections and estimate their value. I don’t remember doing too many, but one of them was absolutely remarkable. There was a Dark Blue Peanut the elephant, a numbered Diana Bear, and two full sets of colored teddies. All told, in 1998 prices, we valued the collection at over a hundred thousand dollars.

I know it looks like hindsight to say that we knew the crash was coming, but it was very clear to us at the time that this was a temporary craze. By the time the millennium rolled around, we only had about half a box of Beanies left, having ditched of all the others while demand was still relatively high. As the prices cratered, we realized that the bubble had burst for good.

New Beginnings

Enjoy what you can while it lasts. Everything changes.

A time may come when Magic cards don’t mean as much to you as they do now. Perhaps a better game will come along or a fundamental shift in design policy will temper your enjoyment. Perhaps you will get a job that doesn’t leave as much time for gaming, or you’ll start a family and your focus will radically shift. Perhaps the world will face a crisis that will make Magic cards feel trivial, or maybe the game will retire gracefully and dual lands will be thousand-dollar pieces of gaming history.

Most people remember the Beanie era with embarrassment at getting suckered into a collectibles bubble that was obvious in retrospect. I will always think back on it as a time where my family and I bonded over a terrific bit of fun that helped shape me as a man.

Fortuna’s wheel doesn’t spin at random—trends are always there if you look for them. Pay attention, be smart, and take nothing for granted.

Oh, and have fun. Beanies—like Magic cards—are just toys in the end.

Until next time—

—Chas Andres