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by The Second Best of Noahs Second Country. . 429 reads.

TNP Pull Event Crashed, Card Olympics End, and a New Most Expensive Card! Card News, edition 4

TNP Pull Event Crashed, Card Olympics End, and a New Most Expensive Card!

June 7, 2020

Card News, edition 4


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The Black Hawks Execute the First Ever Card Raid

A few of the ‘victims’ of this raid

For the second time, TNPs pull event day has been overshadowed by a rogue element. Similar to this event following the April Pull Event, many were unsurprised that the May Pull Event would end the same way - in absolute chaos. Luckily, that’s good for Card News!

Part 1: The Preparation


Funds being transferred via Testlandia S2

Prior to May 30th, the only hint of trouble came with 9003’s hints of ‘evil plans’ and the need for the bank to fund them. With 9003 being unavailable, many wondered what these plans were and how they were to be executed. It is notable that 9003 was involved with the planning for the Pergamon crash event too, so this is not something necessarily new or unexpected. The day prior to the planned pull event, many users of the Cards Discord noticed Refuge Isle and Feu de Glace transferring large amounts of bank via their mass copy transfer cards as well as S2 Testlandia. The bank was being distributed to various Black Hawks, including Ever-Wandering Souls, Miss bad life choices, Lord Dominator, Pterodaxtyl, Varax Zwei, Dyanderna, and Sylh Alanor(note that Sylh Alanor is not a Black Hawk, but they did participate in the execution of this event).
Part 2: The Pull Events
Unsurprisingly, the funds were then put to use during the TNP Pull Event. As soon as it started, 8 cards were put up to auction. Frattastan II was found 53 times, Tupelope was pulled 38 times, Soops was discovered 8 times, Queen Yuno was uncovered 9 times, HMS Unicorn was spawned 64 times, S1 Testlandia was created 12 times, Old Tyrannia was produced 16 times, and lastly, TGU News was found a couple dozen times. All in all, this created a huge interruption in the scarcity of high value cards. With the nature of supply/demand, everyone anticipated a decrease in the MV of the cards, but the question was when - and by how much?

Some notable finders of the cards include Noahs Second Country, Koem Kab, Debussy, Refuge Isle, Feu de Glace, Leto II Atreides, Fauzjhia, Morover, Seanat, Westinor, Yip Man, and Destructive Government Economic System.

Part 3: The Crash
While a crash of some scale was inevitable (or already happening, in the case of TGU News), few expected an intentional crash. However, with little time remaining in the auctions, finds from The Black Hawks were used to place asks of .01 on all of the affected cards. This caused mass panic buying and selling, with the longest auction lasting more than 8 hours past the initial .01 asks. On Frattastan II, Destructive Government Economic System claimed a monopoly on the card, with Koem Kab taking the bank.


On Tupelope, no monopolies were claimed, but Noahs Second Country ran away with 500 bank.

On Soops, Noahs Second Country spent over 1000 bank claiming the monopoly, and winning the bank to compensate.

On Queen Yuno, Koem Kab claimed the bank and the cheap ask accidentally set by The unified missourtama states

On HMS Unicorn, Praeceps claimed the monopoly alongside Noahs Second Country, who also earned the 500 bank. This was a long fought auction, with many names involved.

Testlandia S1 ended with Koem Kab furthering their own monopoly and buying the copies for a low price.

Part 4: The Aftermath
With all of the card crashes and increased supply of various cards, certain nations were able to monopolize a card. In fact, Noahs Second Country reinflated HMS Unicorn to 82 MV, while Testlandia looks like it will bounce back after selling twice for 380. Furthermore, crashes on Queen Yuno and Testlandia were not that large anyway, and in the case of Old Tyrannia, the MV went up. The largest loss was Tupelope, which went from a 15 owner epic exnation to more than 50 owners and a MV of 4. Soops also caused major losses for many nations, dropping from 1200 to a mere 200. The event was undeniably successful from the bank transfers to the closing of the HMS Unicorn auction, however, many feel as if this was to be expected, as the targeted cards were primarily those propped up by a false MV. In the case where that was not true, the MV barely dropped or even went up. This will prove to be an interesting case study in the future, and it was no doubt exciting for spectators and those involved. In that sense, hats off to Refuge Isle and Feu de Glace for planning and executing this event. However, one has to question the sustainability of these actions - what will their lasting consequences be… for the cards, for the players affected, and for the health of the game as a whole. Will we see more shenanigans like this from these players? Probably!

TNP Pull Event - Testlandia, Anime Daisuki, and Solorni!

By Giovanniland

Another month came and went. That means, yet another pull event by The North Pacific happened on the last Sunday of the month! Three cards were put up for sale: the expensive Testlandia, the commended Anime daisuki, and the now ceased-to-exist Solorni. The event started at 18:00 EST, when The Northern Light placed a 500.00 bid on Testlandia and a 100.00 bid on the two other cards, starting auctions that went on for several hours. Unfortunately, on account of the multiple other cards added later, few copies of these cards were found. The pull results for them are:

1. Testlandia S2 was pulled 4 times in total. Evrigenis, Mikeswill, Noahs Second Country and The Northern Light each found one copy.
2. Anime Daisuki was found only once, by Noahs Second Country.
3. Solorni got no pulls.

In conclusion, this was an unlucky event for people that wanted copies of these cards to spawn. In fact, the majority of pulls went instead to other cards that weren't planned to be added. Will the next TNP pull event be more successful, or will we see chaos on the market once again? For now, we can only imagine how it will go.

Huge Shift in Rarity Odds


A mass-CTE in uncommons

More than 1000 puppets belonging to Parhe have ceased to exist, causing a huge shift in rarity odds. Since the large majority of these cards were of uncommon rarity, the likelihood of getting other rarities has gone up significantly. The season 1 average pack junk value skyrocketed above .34. Expect more out of every pack… at least until all the puppets are restored!

Luna's Large Leap
By Giovanniland

During the nights of June 4th and 5th, Luna Amore quietly executed their plan. Unexpected by most, they had been planning this for a good time: a few days before, they had sold nearly every card of their collection, including some copies of the most expensive cards in existence. All these sales earned Luna more than 3,000 bank and allowed them to complete their mischievous ploy. You may now be wondering, how did this happen? Here you can find a close review of this plan.

Luna noticed how many copies of Misplaced States and Aki Zeta they had, with 43 and 85 copies of each card, res[ectively. Prior to their plan, they were worth next to nothing in market value, but that was set to change. Luna's first action was to increase the value of Misplaced States. They matched an ask of 3.00, and few seconds before the auction ended, matched an ask of 2580.00 with their other nation, Steampunk ariel - a tactic known as piggybacking, and often used for transfers of great sums of bank. The second part of the plan was to expand the value of Aki Zeta, the other card. It was done an hour later, but differently: Luna asked 10.00 for the card, and had their puppet increase their bid to 3000.00 without a high ask, thus matching at half. This gave Aki Zeta a market value of 155.00, and activity on that card ceased. However, that was not the end! Some time later, Luna increased the value of Misplaced States even further, by matching another bid and ask of 3000 between themselves. The final value of the card was an astonishing 1012 bank!

The result? All this madness increased Luna Amore's deck value (DV) more than tenfold, from 1500.00 to 56,000.00! This jump now gives them a comfortable place between the top 10 of card farmers. Some may argue that over time they'll see their riches vanish due to deflation, but for now, Luna has the 4th most valuable deck. This resembles Farrakhan's jump, where they briefly took over the 1st place from Koem Kab, only to see their efforts vanish after the card gradually lost its value. This is also the second largest single day jump of a nation ever, only behind Feu de Glace’s jump following the Pergamon pull event. Misplaced States also sits at the top of the card value leaderboard!

Card Olympics Conclude…


The prizes given to the winners

9003’s Olympic games have concluded with some exciting action. The lead in Uncommons held by Bawkie was quickly being converged on by Morover, and Noahs Second Country. Fauzjhia decided to commit their huge sum of bank to winning the Epics category, which was dominated by Evrigenis throughout the games, while they were attempting to also win Commons. With most competitors waiting until the last minute, things were very rushed and came down to the final minutes before major, where the competition would end. Due to events of the day, nations like Noahs Second Country were also heavily distracted opening packs and winning auctions.

Here is what unfolded in each category:

Commons: One Small Island led the category throughout the games, however, it became clear towards the end that Evrigenis was closing in quickly. Evrigenis had more bank, but it was a race against time on the last day… somehow One Small Island managed to hold on to the victory!
Uncommons: Bawkie held the lead for a while throughout the games, but Morover was right there the whole time, with a legendary stored and ready to sell. Once Noahs Second Country made it clear they were gunning for the category, the legendary was sold and the race was neck and neck. In fact, with Morover sniping some of Noah’s auctions, nobody was aware of who would win. In the end, Noahs Second Country won by a mere 19 cards!
Rares: throughout the entire games, it appeared that either Ender vi or Card Vault was set to win, with a large lead. However, Portsville quietly and smartly stocked up on bank throughout the games, then purchased rares at the last minute, pushing them up into first place!
Ultra-rares: Fauzjhia won this category easily with no issues with their lucky pull of Reploid Productions halfway through the month. Nobody dared to seriously challenge the category.
Epic: Perhaps the most action packed category, and also the most controversial. Evrigenis led throughout the games, while simultaneously flipping the epics to make some small profit. However, Fauzjhia noticed this flipping and bought out Evrigenis by using their main nation. This was completely legal, and as Evrigenis acknowledged, “quite brilliant.” However, 9003 decided to disqualify Fauzjhia from the category on the grounds of bad sportsmanship for unrelated comments to Giovanniland. This left Mediobogdum II as the winner!
Pokemon: Morover was simultaneously seeking out Pokemon cards with the Uncommons, but fell short to Oofery, who triumphed in the end!

Congratulations to all of the winners!

9003 has announced that the next games will be in a duos format, so find a partner… here’s the link: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=486652

Card Hunger Games 4 Announced
Harmonic Empire has announced a fourth run of Hunger Games, now limited to 2 entries per person. The prizing structure has also been adjusted to recognize most kills as well as the winner. See the dispatch here:



~~~ Card Hunger Games ~~~
Reservation List

This dispatch is designed for those who would like to reserve their slot for the next Card Hunger Games. Telegram Harmonic Empire for reservations, you can reserve your slots now by throwing an epic before the announcement officially comes out. The Rewarding System will also be different every time a new run comes out.


???
???
Reward: ???

EIGHTH RUN - 48 TRIBUTES (2 DUMMIES)

Donestk
Dominon of newfouland and labrador
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test
Test

Reserve for Future Run
---
Note for Future Run
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Forum Thread: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=458820
Discord Link: LinkNS Trading Card
[Edited 18/07/2020]


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Read dispatch

Trader Spotlight
Refuge Isle has caused chaos via various events, including the surprise Pergamon pull event, heisting a TNP pull event, and more recently, the first ever ‘cards raid’. Card News was able to obtain this interview which helps to explain their intentions and perspective on cards as a whole.

Interview with Refuge Isle
Interview conducted by The unified missourtama states. Note that it is more than a month old, and answers are subject to change
Q: What brought you to collecting cards, and what is keeping you collecting?
A: I think that I fell in love with the idea of cards because it represented the whole of the NS community as an unprepared picture album. Everyone was there and all of the aspects of the different players were lodged in trading card form, but without some company worrying about sales, and without entries being filtered by an editor concerned about how it would be received. I felt like this gave the whole system a much wider range of hidden gems that you could find.
I ended up getting heavily invested because of my propensity to spend all day idling in MMO auction houses seeing if I could tweak the system to turn a profit and, more specifically, how to break the economic system. Which I think I ended up doing, more or less.
Q: How do you feel the card community is changing? is it getting better or worse?
A: Initially, I feel like everyone was in this same sort of inspired spirit of seeing what they could do with the system. Genuinely, a big perk in the beginning was that cards were a part of NationStates, but in a way that was disconnected and isolated from regional/interregional politics. Basically, if you wanted to do something, you were free to do it and then show off what you managed to accomplish.
This ended up progressively changing, and it became more and more about prestige and your level of involvement to the more or less arbitrary social norms of the leading cabal. With everyone now locked in a kind of economic cold-war competition, at the moment, I would have to describe the environment as overly toxic and focused on how other people’s actions affect their deck value. In that regard, it's not too much different from the politics of r/d, but certainly that change of pace was nice while it was the around.
Q: Many small cards players like to maintain the idea of large farmers (such as you) as villains, do you agree, do you like this perception?
A: At times, of course, that’s accurate. Cards are an area of NS where you can always put in more work if you want to, and some people spend every waking moment taking advantage of that opportunity. In the process, it creates resources and tools that can be held over other players to hurt them or lock them out of doing something that they want. But this is also not universally the case. Just like anything else, you can elect to use your resources for very positive things that people will enjoy, like running a card lottery, olympics, or other kinds of regional activity programs. In most cases, people don’t really use them for anything at all, positive or negative.
The biggest problem with the idea of viewing card farmers as villains is this notion that anyone that ever wants to do something with cards, needs to do it with the same intensity of people who spend all day with it in order to “keep up”. This idea of “keeping up,” where you can only do things and you only view yourself in terms of other people, eventually leads to the same toxicity that I’ve grown wary of over the last year. I would personally be more concerned with the negative consequences of thousands of farms randomly answering five issues every day, and in that regard farmers to some amount of damage to the game.
Q: What is your favorite card?
A: That’s rather difficult, I think that I have a lot of favourite cards that are that way for different reasons. So, like Season 1 Sanctaria is probably the most attractive card I have because the colour scheme is amazing. But the cards that I value the most are just the ones that represent different people that I have personal relationships with. So, in that regard, my favourite card is Season 2 Sylh Alanor, because we’re married :p
Q: What is your favorite collection? Why?
A: My favourite collection is probably DGES’ Really Good Trees for S2, because it’s visually fantastic, and sort of breaks the norm for what you would expect from a political browser game. It’s not very expensive to replicate, and very expressive of different personalities on NS. So it’s still true for all of the things that I value in cards.
Q: What advice do you have for others in the card community? (Both spiritually and technically)
A: My best advice is to just do the things that you want, without regard to what others are doing or how you’ll be perceived for playing the game your particular way. Celebrate your own personal successes and share cool things with other people and you can find the same possibilities with it that I did.

Thank you Refuge Isle for your participation! If you would like to be interviewed or you would like to request an interview, please telegram Noahs Second Country for more information.

New Publications
A few cards releases/events have occurred over the past week:

LinkHistory of NationStates Cards, How it’s Developed, and How it is Still Evolving to This Date by Destructive Government Economic System - DGES was invited by an event planner of the NationStates Great Exhibition to be a speaker, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. This is one of the best pieces of card literature out there, and perhaps the most complete documentation of NS cards as a whole. Card News reached out to DGES and asked them a couple of questions:


What did the event entail for you?
This event, should I make a good impression on the audience, was a chance for the NationStates community to fully realize the potential of cards (along with the community that has sprung forth from cards) within the site. This is due to the fact that known players from all over the game were going to (either) be speaking during this event or view the posts that each speaker made.

With that in mind, I made sure to spend at least a month writing in order to bring about the desired impression.
Did you choose the topic, and if so, why did you choose it?
Yes, I chose the topic entirely on my own. The topic would be rather unknown to others (not dealing with gameplay, roleplay, or anything that people are already familiar with), but seeing that I wanted to promote international artwork to players of other communities, I would naturally have chosen a cards-based topic for my speech. As to why my cards-based topic dealt with the history behind cards, this is due to my desire to prove (to everyone out there) the outstanding growth that we (as in, the cards community) have experienced so far - along with just how much of an impact we’ve already made.

I knew that summarizing several years of cards-based events would be a challenge, but this was likely the most ideal topic in order to fulfill my objective of promulgating international artwork, so - each day - I devoted a large portion of my time in order to strengthen the speech that would relate to that topic, and the results of that work (assuming those results are good) are shown in the post I made.

All in all, the topic - selected entirely by self-choice - was used to confirm to NationStates of the impressive amount of growth + impact that cards has witnessed over the few years it’s existed.

Do you have anything else to add?
Apparently there is going to be a NSGE event - similar to the one of this year - in 2021. While I do not expect anyone to perform as a speaker in that event (as like I did), it would do the community much if people actively went and took part in events seemingly unrelated to cards - and promoting cards at those events in a way that will make people interested in our community in the future.

By promoting cards, you can expect people to participate in this part of the game, or at least come to respect its overall existence within NationStates.

The 6 W’s of TCALS by Noahs Second Country - A brief explanation of TCALS with evidence. Note that the guide does not cover the ‘How’ it works, but will cover that in the future.

Containerise: Efficient Card Farming by Racoda - A guide to setting up and using containers, a firefox feature that enables farmers to skip the login step, saving a ton of time with minimal effort.

TUMS’ International Artwork Market Availability Scale by The unified missourtama states - An interesting approach to determining the value of a card to predict the actual value of a card.

If any card literature comes to your attention, please let us know by TGing Noahs Second Country

Collection Spotlight
By Giovanniland - forum thread

A few notable collections have come to attention over the past week. Check them out!

All is default: Default flag collector BuccaRuu, a puppet of TalAkMaChen, has gathered over 14 thousand cards with default flags! Isn't that a lot? The Australian Aboriginal flag is certainly the most common flag in NS.

Class Cards: A project by The unified missourtama states with more than 1,500 cards. TUMS has also built a leaderboard of other class card collectors like him, that can be seen here!

The Dragons of NS: Rikanhimel may be a new trading card collector, but they're frequently buying dragon cards! You'll get amazed by all the cards in the collection - which includes only one copy of Welsh and Bhutanese flags, by the way.

NationStates Art Gallery: Cards are frequently called 'artworks' in several places - such as the International Artwork stat. However, this collection displays real artworks, from everywhere and from ancient to modern times!

Want free cards?
Everyone loves ‘free’ cards, and Card News is offering another chance to get some! In its current state, Card News is solely run by Noahs Second Country as an independent effort to aggregate interesting events in the cards community and hopefully draw some more attention to the scene. However, real life interests and other obligations can get in the way, hence why this edition was released a week late. To combat this, I’m trying to recruit new authors with 1 free legendary card per 2 articles written for Card News. Naturally, there will be some quality standards, but all you need to do is send Noahs Second Country the following:


Card News Writer Form

Nation Name:enter the name of your card collecting nation
Article Topic:Give a general idea of the article you would like to write
Additional Comments:Add notes here

After I approve the article topic, further instructions will be given. Hopefully, doing this will result in higher quality, longer, and more detailed articles from a variety of authors. Thanks for your support, and thank you to all of the authors that have joined recently!

Subscribers will be pinged in every future dispatch. Please TG me to let me know you want to subscribe. New subscribers also qualify for a free season 2 CTE Epic card!

The Second Best of Noahs Second Country

Edited:

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