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The upshot is that I have two points to note to be of help to those who have recently asked questions about pricing and price guides(with the caveat that I have far less years of experience in this hobby than most everyone else on this forum -- so I may make mistakes/give poor advice on occasion):
A) Guides: I believe that it is helpful to have two guides -- one with a lot of recent price data in a tabular format (Cohenour or Becker -- they have different strengths) -- and another which has a lot of photo data -- which can be unweidly for travel and may be harder to keep as many items up to date (such as Anderson's or Howdy's). Note: I have been unable to find the Culver Guide (is it still in print?)
B) Prices: In light of the IGT situation, I have not seen any drop-off in values -- and some seldomly seen $7s have been going for above price range. As long as everyone cashes in common strikes for melt, I believe that those at the tail end of their collecting may use this occasion to sell, but others will use it to snap up those seldomly seen items. While I recognize that in a worst case scenario of "No Machines", there would be fewer "new" collectors -- at least those drawn in from playing the machines. That said, of the 100s of hours I have played the machines, people do come up and ask what I am doing -- and despite my enthusiasm in explaining -- I doubt I have actually helped create more than one new collector. The upshot? Worst case of no machines has a positive side. Everyone has a discretionary spending limit for Strikes. If there are fewer or no new ones, I don't see why collectors wouldn't use that money to acquire strikes that might have been out of their budget in the past. Additionally, as in the coin market, I believe that we might see a move towards more differentiation between values for top quality specimens vs. lower quality tokens of the same issue(in terms of manufacturing or preservation). There are plenty of examples in the coin (and tokens for that matter -- going back over 100 years) markets of healthy values and liquid markets of so-called "obsolete" items.
Well..there's my two cents. And I am putting my money where my mouth is (although I will still sell dupes and non-core strikes in order to help fund purchases of the areas where I truly want to complete denomination sets).
Dave W. SS-1044
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