You don't have to be a genious to work this one out, cars are a really bad thing.

There are a bunch of reasons why, but here are a few off the top of my head;

• Cars Polute
• Cars use up a finiate resource (oil - one that we are running low on)
• Cars create a sence of isolation that allows the passangers to act in public in a way that they wouldn't outside the car (road rage, you don't hear of pedestrian rage)
• Cars encourage lazy behaviour

and this is before I mention the wars they cause of the way they enable the rich to get richer.

Now this isn't to say that I want cars compleatly removed, of course not. Trades people, handycapped and elderly people with difficult needs like parents, etc all have a need for access to a car

What I would like to see though is a reduction in the number of health people using cars simply for the stupid convenience of them. The extreme example that illustrates where I am going here is people driving to the gym.

I bought an pair of unused costume redemption card off a well know auction site, and though the card was over a year old it had no expiry date, and my experience with Inkworks made me think that all manufacturers were as honest.

I sent the cards in and had them returned saying that they were out of date and would not be honoured.

A little earlier I had been buying some of the same company’s cards from a straightforward ebay dealer who, when I sent them my wants list, offered me a few extremely hard to find autographs from the same set as my costume cards.

A little though and a simple question and I realised that this was the same person that I had been dealing with for the redemption cards.

There may be more to the situation than I am aware of, but it appeared to me that the dealer was waiting about a year after a sets release and then clearing out all unclaimed cards. Fair enough if you put a date on a redemption card, but when the redemption card doesn’t have an expiry date that strikes me as dishonest.

There were an additional two incidents involving being sold a box of cards locally from this same manufacturer which were labelled as guaranteed autographs in every box, only to find out that these were overprints which the manufacturer had sold off, without a numbered seal, but still marked as containing an autographs.

The final burn was buying a limited, numbered case topper set from the auction seller (it was during this transaction that I discovered they were also the manufacturer) and when it arrived it was unnumbered.

What really got me was that this hobby is built on faith, the manufacturers licence a title and produce cards. When the cards are limited then we trust the manufacturer to be honest and upfront with us. The recent situation with Indiana Jones illustrates two important points; People are edgy when they have committed to a set with little description, and when the autograph signers list and again when the odds are revealed the value adjusts itself. Look at how the case prices went up when Ford, Lucas and Spielberg were announced, without knowing the odds, and again how signers like Molina went up when the odds were announced.

What I think this thread and the “LOTR Autos on eBay” thread say to me are that when a manufacturer decides that they have bought a licence to print money and start cutting the corners like trading on auction sites under a different name and selling off as much stock as they can it doesn’t just destroy the market value it destroys the faith in the manufacturer and the hobby.