Sounds like very bad luck to me. I was never much into collecting - too many modern design practices that subvert the time investment and remind you you're dumb for doing it the hard way.

Ex. - today if you simply watched their twitch streams, they were giving away coveted collector's mount that hasn't been available for years (discontinued card game) - had a $3k value because of it's rarity. Although you could argue that spending $3k for a video game item is dumb, that doesn't matter - the disregard of the system that gave it value is going to tell a lot of collectors to not waste their time.