[mbg721]

The Beanie Baby case is interesting; I think it represents a turning point where gamified artificial scarcity in entertainment started to become more aggressive. (The pog craze and the first wave of collectible card games happened around the same time.) Ty went crazy making different beanie babies of various rarities, and even after the bubble had become obvious, there were people still compulsively buying them all (although I think you always knew which one you were buying). Before that, it seemed like mixing in intentionally rare items was just confined to baseball cards.