It occurred to me yesterday when I wrote this blog that there was a really interesting story I was leaving untold. I included a picture that showed all my rarest Myachis and as I looked back over it, I realized that every single Paper Tag I own has a cool story associated with it. None of them came easily and with one exception, they all came at different times.
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| Just a reminder in case you didn't get a chance to salivate over that picture yesterday. |
And for those who just can't get enough of hearing about my collection, I present the story of my rares:
These two sacks entered my collection as part of the biggest trade I ever did. It was with a notoriously good trader as well so I was pretty nervous going into it. I got these two sacks and a Rice Krispies Treats for a Slick Black Leather, a Green Sponge, a Diggity and an Amgen.
Now, of course, this was in the pre-Sackthology days, but as you can all easily calculate, this was a pretty even deal. The Hunter Green (262), Black Velvetine (262) and Rice Krispies (163) have a combined trade value of 687. The Slick Black (262), the Green Sponge (262), the Diggity (53) and the Amgen (105) have a combined trade value of 682, which means that we were less than a common away from a perfectly even trade.
But Crazy Dog, if you're reading this all these years later, I still owe you less than a common and I'm willing to make good. Talk to me and I'll hook you up with two thirds of a Lumber Jack Yellow.
Okay, so I suppose this is the least interesting story since this is a Myachi that Myachi Man just gave me. But it is kind of interesting to reflect on why the Blue Suede Shoe is so much more common than any other paper tag.
In about 2007, Myachi Man was cleaning up some stuff in his basement, which was serving at the time as the Myachi headquarters. For years we'd run the operation out of a combination of his basement, his brother's garage and the Myachi Mobile. It should come as little surprise, then, that as he was cleaning up he came across a point of purchase display that contained several extremely rare Myachis. There were, for whatever reason, about 25 Blue Suede Shoes just sitting together in a box.
Keep in mind that before this happened, the Blue Suede Shoe was every bit as hard to find as a Green Sponge or a Slick Black. This would be kind of like happening upon a whole box of double looped Blue Dragons today.
Myachi Man put all of them out on the market almost immediately. I got one, but most of them went to deserving Myachi Maniacs who were dedicated to the game but didn't have the kind of money one would need to get a paper tag on E-Bay.
This was one that I'd like to say I earned. It spent about 4 or 5 years hiding in the Myachi Mobile, desperately avoiding the light. It had managed to get wedged between the fold out couch and the kitchenette and there is stayed, gathering dust for almost (or slightly over) half a decade.
Then, one fateful afternoon when I was taking a day off from Universal Studios, I decided to give the Myachi Mobile as thorough a cleaning as she'd ever gotten. It was a gorgeous day out (Orlando has a lot of those) so I just opened her up, took out all the boxes, the displays, the skill toys, the drawers, the cabinets... basically, everything that wasn't nailed down.
As I was scrubbing the thing from front to back, I kept finding these great Myachis. I found a few 1.0s, a couple of Verizons and a Dunkin' Donuts. Now, keep in mind that this was in 2006 so the commons at the time were series 2.0 and the Verizon and DD were still pretty much new promos so it wasn't exactly as exciting as finding those things now.
But finding the Yellow Wetsuit was pretty awesome. It was too rare a sack for me to just claim because I'd found it so the next time I saw Kid Myach I showed it to him. He flipped out and asked me where I found it. I told him the story and when he realized how deep a cleaning I'd have to be doing to find it, he told me to keep it.
This was another one I got from Myachi Man and it was actually the first Paper Tag I ever owned. It wasn't exactly a gift, either. It was more like a wager.
We were at the cabin that the Myachi team stayed at during the 2004 Dollywood assignment. This was my first year with the company and I actually lived elsewhere in town, but most days we would all hang out at the cabin for several hours after the park closed down before I headed home.
Myachi Man was in town so we were talking about our favorite moves and I nominated the Daredevil. When I did it, I did so as brazenly as possible by saying something like "Well, I finally mastered the Daredevil so I'd have to say at the moment, that's my favorite trick."
Well, I'd been with the company for about 3 weeks at the time so Myachi Man has some understandable doubts about my claim to having "mastered" the Daredevil, so he asks, "So out of 10, how many can you hit?"
"Ten," I boasted.
That's when he laid down his wager. He had this beautiful Red Swirl paper tag and he told me that if I could hit ten Daredevils without a drop he would give it to me. I suppose I don't need to tell you that I did hit all ten of them... I probably wouldn't be telling you the story if I didn't.
This one was a gift from a collector who got into the game way before my time. I hate to admit that I can't remember his name now. I knew him for two weeks about 6 years ago so I suppose it's forgivable, but he was a cool enough guy that I'm still kicking myself for forgetting it.
He'd gotten into the game in about 2001 when Myachi first started selling at Kitty Hawk Kites. He worked there running kayaking tours and guided nature walks and since I'm a pretty outdoorsy dude we hit it off right away. He even offered me a free kayak tour after work on day, but the weather was never nice enough for it during the time I was there.
We did hang out indoors a bit, though, and of course, that meant Myachi. We played quite a bit of chaos and I taught some of his other friends how to play as well. Eventually he broke out his collection and showed me a bunch of Myachis that I'd heard about before but never seen, including two Purple Swirls.
On my last day in KHK before flying back to Florida, a bunch of the people that worked there put together a little gift bag for me and sitting right on top was the gem pictured above.
I could just tell the short version of this story; "I stole it from Pinky", and to be honest I'm kind of tempted to leave it at that because the sooner I get done with this article the sooner Rush and I can play some ping pong, but there's too much more to say, so I'll give you the details.
Pinky and I saw this Myachi in a video years ago and while I simply remarked that I thought it was really cool, Pinky fell in love with it. It became her quest to get her hands on the Iridescent Rainbow and eventually she harangued Myachi Man enough that he promised to give her one if he ever came across one. Needless to say, after about a year and a half of reminding him, eventually he came across one.
And then I started offering trades. She was into the animal print Myachis so I offered a bunch of Leopards, a Yellow Cat, a Zebra, a made in Mexico Dalmatian and a Royal Tiger. Pinky laughed and handed me the tube.
Turned out that it was never about getting the Myachi for herself. After she heard me say that I thought it was cool she decided to get me one and she knew that Myachi Man was powerless against her smile and puppy-dog eyes.
Originally, Myachi Man just gave me this one so that I could show it to some of the maniacs. He was in Tennessee but he was still in contact with a lot of the NYC maniacs and a lot of them were dying to see and touch the legendary "Clear" Myachi. Since he couldn't exactly spend his days hanging out at FAO and waiting to see if maniacs would show up, he did the next best thing: He gave the Clear to me since I was already hanging out at FAO and waiting for maniacs to show up.
But when he passed it along, he made it very clear that he wasn't giving me the Myachi, just loaning it to me so that I could show it to some people. I agreed and promised to treat it with the care and respect that it deserved.
For more than a year it sat there in my collection. I would bring it to FAO once in a while so that a new batch of Myachi fanatics could drool over it but most of the time it just sat there, co-mingling with my other paper tags.
Then one day a kid from a very wealthy family decided he wanted that Clear Myachi more than anything else in the world and his father set about trying to buy it from me. He offered me a hundred bucks, but I told him it wasn't mine to sell. Then he offered me five hundred bucks and asked if it still wasn't mine to sell. When I said no to that, he offered me a thousand and just so I knew he was serious, he actually pulled ten one hundred dollar bills out of his wallet.
I explained that it wasn't mine, but I would talk to Myachi Man and see. So that night I called Myachi Man and told him what had happened. It was Christmas time and we weren't making much money back then so Myachi Man knew that a thousand bucks would have made a world of difference in my personal finances so he tells me the last thing I expected to hear:
"I'll leave it to you," he said, "if you want to sell it, go ahead. You can even keep the money."
I was flabbergasted. I hadn't even considered that as a possibility, I just figured I was passing along an offer to Myachi Man. So then I looked at the Clear and I thought about those ten one hundred dollar bills. I thought of the way that kid's eyes would light up when I brought it in, the wonder and reverence that they regarded it with. I thought about how extremely rare they were and how if I sold this one I would probably never see another. I thought about all the future generations of Myachi maniacs that would never actually get to see one outside of a picture.
And then I called the dad and told him that I appreciated the offer but I just wouldn't feel right selling it at any price. He doubled his offer to two grand and I didn't budge. I thanked him and explained my decision and I suppose he understood.
A week later Myachi Man came into town and we were over at his apartment talking. He asked me if I'd spent that thousand dollars on Christmas presents and I shook my head. "Couldn't bring myself to sell it," I admitted.
"You turned down a thousand bucks?" he said with wide eyes.
"Two thousand, actually," I said and took a sip from my Mountain Dew (I don't actually remember if I was drinking a Dew at the time, but odds are in favor of it).
Myachi Man smiled and sat back, "Me too."
Turns out the same dad had contacted him and offered him the same amount for a Clear Myachi. He'd turned it down because there's no way Myachi Man would sell a Myachi for that much money but he figured if I needed the money bad enough he wouldn't stand in my way of taking it. When I told him why I couldn't bring myself to sell it, he was impressed.
He was so impressed, in fact, that he gave me something of a reward. When he gave it to me he even said, "Now that I know that you would never sell it..."
And then he gave me the rarest Myachi in my collection, and one of the ten rarest on the planet:
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| The Goldfish. |
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