Where Can I Buy Rare Myachis?

by Crazy Ivan


First, let me throw out a quick apology to my regular readers.  I won't be presenting much in the way of new information in this particular post, so if you've been reading this blog for a while, I'm just going to spend the next few paragraphs telling you stuff that you already know.

My goal with this post is actually to draw in new readers.  My hope is that this blog will show up near the top of the page whenever people Google "Where can I find rare Myachis?" or "Where can I buy rare Myachis?".  This is, after all, the single most common question on our Facebook page, our forum, my in-box, my private messages and on Twitter.  People always want to know where they can find rare Myachis.

Of course, there are really only two reliable places; E-Bay and Myachi Maniacs.  Maniacs will often have tradable rare and semi-rare sacks and when old collectors whittle down their collections, they usually offer a few up on E-Bay.  These are the only consistent ways to find rare Myachis.  But generally, the people who ask this question aren't satisfied by that answer.

There is another option, of course, but it's difficult, time-consuming and has no guarantee of success.  I'll get to that in a minute, but before I do, let me present two facts that will seem stupidly self-evident, but which still must be addressed:

#1) Rare Myachis are rare.


#2) The rarer a Myachi is, the rarer that Myachi is.


Again, I apologize if it seems like I'm being silly or pedantic, but that it seems that a lot of people don't fully understand that.  The term "rare Myachi" gets throw around as though it were simply a type of Myachi, rather than a distinction of availability.

The point is that if there were some website where one could simply go and purchase rare Myachis, they wouldn't be rare.  They would be currently available on some website.  If there was a store that sold rare Myachis, they wouldn't really be rare... they would be available at that store.

Rare Myachis are rare specifically because there isn't a store or a website where you can buy them.  And if you're lucky enough to find a website that has retired Myachis, odds are pretty good that they'll be, at best, semi-rare.

All Myachis are made in limited editions.  For example, in the current 5.2 series, there are exactly 4,200 of each type of Myachi.  There are 4,200 Gr8ful Shred Blacks, 4,200 Comic Cammos, 4,200 Red Dragons, etc.  There are 12 types of Myachi in the series, which means that in total , there are 50,400 Myachis in the series.

Once all those sell out, they're gone.  We won't make any more 5.2s so if you didn't get a Comic Cammo then, you're not going to easily find one.

Of course, once Myachi sells out of the 5.2s, they won't automatically become rare.  We sell most of our Myachis to stores rather than to individual collectors, so after Myachi runs out as a company, there will still be hundreds of stores all over the world that still have 5.2s for sale.  Depending on how quickly Myachis sell out of each store, they might still be available for 3-6 months after we're sold out on our website.

After that, the 5.2 series will be "Semi-rare".  That's a distinction we put on a series that is, for the most part, sold out in all stores.  But it is still widely available to collectors because pretty much everyone has one in their collection and it's not old enough to be a prized sack.  So if you want, for example, a Hot Lava Yellow, you'll probably still be able to get one even if most stores have sold it out.

But if you fast forward a couple of years, it will be a heck of a lot harder to find that particular Myachi.  The Hot Lava Yellow would have sold out of stores years earlier and the only ones that would still be around would be sitting in people's collections.  By then it would be a pretty rare Myachi so Maniacs wouldn't want to give it up for nothing.  If you had your heart set on a Hot Lava Yellow in 2015, your only real options would be to find a collector with one he or she would trade or sell, or keep a close eye on auction sites with hopes that one will come available.

So if you look backwards along the Myachi timeline, you can see sacks at all different strata of rarity.  If you want a Night Rider (a 5.0), you're going to have some trouble finding it.  It's already sold out of stores, but there might be one available through some online retailer that hasn't been selling a lot of Myachis lately.  Heck, there might even be some stores in less Myachi-dense areas that still have the whole 5.0 series available.

If you're desire was a Rolling Thunder (a 4.2), it's probably too late to happen upon it in a store or on a website.  This series was sold out years ago and now the only ones in existence are probably the ones in people's collections.  Keep in mind that for non-collectors, Myachis get lost constantly.  You toss one too high, it gets caught in a tree and you're out of luck.  The older a Myachi is, the more of them that will have been lost to trees, gutters, elevator shafts, dogs, really messy bedrooms, rooftops, large bodies of water and other various booby traps that litter the world when you play a lot of Myachi.

The further back you go, of course, the harder each sack is to find.  And everybody who is looking for rare Myachis is looking for really rare Myachis.  People are always coming in asking me where they can find a White Belt or a Slick Black Leather or a Hunter Green Paper Tag.  And I have to simply shrug.  There were only 85 White Belts ever made and that was in 2006.  It's estimated that by now only about 50 or 60 of them are still around and virtually all of those are in the hands of pretty serious Myachi collectors.  There is absolutely no chance that you will ever find a White Belt for sale in a store.  And odds are pretty good that if anybody has decided to sell one, it's somebody who knows exactly how rare it is.

So to bring this whole thing full circle, rare Myachis are rare and extremely rare Myachis are extremely rare.  There is no easy way to find a particular rare Myachi you're looking for and there's probably no cheap way to buy it.

But there are two other ways one can obtain rare Myachis.  One is to hunt.  The hunt can be fun, but it takes a lot of time.  There are a few small stores that buy Myachis once at a trade show or something then take them home to some town where nobody knows what a Myachi is.  These stores will sit on them for a really long time.  Now, most stores won't let anything sit on their shelves for years.  So if the Myachis don't sell for a long enough period, they'll give them away as a "free gift with purchase" or they'll donate them to a Christmas Toy Drive or something like that.  But every once in a while, they'll hold on to them.  And every once in a while you can find those stores.

The odds are overwhelmingly against you.  You can pick through our store locator and try to find some of the older entries.  You can call around and research locally owned stores online.  You can focus in on historic Myachi hot-spots like Virginia Beach; Ocean City, Maryland; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Cocoa Beach, Florida; Dallas, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia and, of course, New York, New York.  You can keep your eyes peeled every time you travel and go into as many independent toy and hobby stores you can find and eventually, with a lot of persistence and a little luck, you may come across an absolute gem.

Of course, it's more likely that you'll come across a bunch of semi-rare sacks from a few series ago, but picking up a bunch of those will give you great trade material to pick up an even older sack from a collector.  Two 4.2s could probably net you a 4.0 and a 4.0 plus two more 4.2s will likely earn you a 3.1.  So if you decide to go the hunting route, it's best to be ready to pick up whatever you find.  Don't go looking specifically for a Red Beard, but rather, get to know your series and simply look for older Myachis.

There's a second method that requires a lot more time and a lot less effort.  I only mention it because when I explain how difficult it is to build a collection of rare Myachis, people always want to know how I managed it.  After all, I have one of the biggest collections of old Myachis in the world.  How did I get all my rare Myachis?  Simple.  I just got them when they were common.

The second method is simple patience.  Any Myachi you get will be rare in time.