Published November 13, 2025 | By Alyx E, Founder of Collectors MD

Every few months, the hobby gets hit with another controversy, another exposé, another reminder that the ecosystem we participate in isn’t as clean or as fair as we want to believe. This week, it’s shill bidding—yet again. Another platform. Another auction. Another wave of collectors realizing that the game they’re trying to play honestly might not always be played honestly around them.

And once again, the reactions split into two predictable camps:“This is unacceptable.” vs. “It’s just part of the hobby”. But buried underneath all the noise is a deeper truth: When there is no oversight, no regulation, and no accountability, the people who get hurt the most are the same people who love this hobby the most.

Shill bidding isn’t just about a higher comp. It isn’t just about someone inflating the price of their own card to cash out higher. It’s about something much bigger: It erodes trust. It distorts reality. And it fuels the very compulsive behaviors so many collectors are desperately trying to get away from.

When a fake bidding war sets a new “market value”—especially for a highly valued, highly coveted card—that number becomes the target people chase. It becomes the justification for overspending, overextending, and convincing ourselves that “this card is only going up”. It becomes the spark that lights the dopamine fuse—and the fallout almost always hits the collector, not the seller.

Moments like these show just how quickly a single inflated bid can warp reality—turning excitement into pressure, curiosity into compulsion, and a simple auction into a psychological minefield for collectors trying to make good decisions.

Shill bidding is just one more symptom of a hobby with zero oversight. It’s what happens when an entire ecosystem is evolving faster than the ethics required to sustain it.

And if you’re someone who’s struggled with compulsive collecting, gambling-like behaviors, or the chase mentality that so many mechanisms in this hobby are designed to trigger, then you already know: manipulated markets lead to manipulated mindsets. You start to doubt your instincts. You start to believe you’re “behind” when you’re not. You start to chase comps that were never real in the first place.

The cycle accelerates, the clarity fades, and the harm becomes invisible until it’s already done. So today’s reflection is simple: Don’t let someone else’s dishonesty trick you into abandoning your own intuition.

Pause before you bid. Question comps that look suspicious. Walk away from anything that feels engineered to keep you spending instead of thinking. Trust your gut—not the inflated number on a screen. Because the hobby has enough smoke and mirrors as it is. Your job is to stay grounded in what’s real.

And what’s real is this: Integrity isn’t an inconvenience. It’s the foundation of a healthy hobby. And the more we demand it—from platforms, from sellers, and from ourselves—the stronger this community becomes.

#CollectorsMD
When the market tries to manipulate your impulse, choose intention instead.

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