→ Engineered Scarcity vs. Natural Rarity

In collecting, scarcity is manufactured.

Rarity is discovered. 

Scarcity is a choice… a production plan, an edition size, a serial stamp, a release calendar designed to create the feeling of thin supply.

Rarity is the opposite: the residue of time, attrition, and improbable survival. One can be dialed up in a factory meeting. The other is earned through decades, sometimes centuries, and occasionally epochs. Markets blur the distinction on purpose because scarcity is easy to mint and easy to market, while rarity takes patience to verify and a bit of intuition to price. But if you care about building a collection that ages well, pulling these two apart is the first discipline.

This week, for the 206th edition of Shiny Thing$ as we prepare to open our Barosaurus IPO on 10/22, we’re mapping the difference across cards, cars, and a few other corners of culture before ending where natural rarity is most honest: deep time.

Cards: from junk wax to rainbow mines

Baseball cards are the cleanest lesson in how supply mutates.

In the late eighties and early nineties, publishers flooded the market with product, treating demand as a bottomless pit. Price and volume looked like friends until the lights came on and we realized we were holding closets of undifferentiated paper from a period that would be branded the Junk Wax Era. Today, the industry has evolved into a more elegant form of the same idea. Instead of brute-force overprinting, supply hides in plain sight through engineered scarcity: color parallels, foil variations, inserts, short prints, super short prints, and the triumphant seal of individuality - “1/1” - that is only singular within a particular corridor of a sprawling set. It is possible, and common, to pull a one-of-one and still be one of many one-of-ones living next door in slightly different clothes.

Modern cards aren’t inherently inferior for this. They simply occupy a multi-dimensional supply curve.

The question that serious collectors ask has shifted from whether a piece is stamped 1/1 to how many adjacent corridors also produce their version of singularity. When you strip away labels, foils, and serials, very few modern issues remain truly unique. By contrast, vintage rarity is almost always tied to survival rather than planning. A pre-war card in exceptional condition remains rare even if you drop it on a table with no slab and no sticker because the decades themselves did the editing. The stories that still punch today - early rookies that became cultural institutions, legitimate production errors with clear provenance, fragile regional issues that were never made to last - are anchored to realities outside marketing. That is natural rarity: the kind that exists even when no one is trying to sell you on it.

Cars: plaques vs. provenance

Automakers understand psychology as well as any luxury house…

Engrave “1 of 500” on a dash plaque, and you’ve created a ritual. The idea of a limited run is real enough; the factory did, in fact, cap the number. But it remains a cap that could have been set higher or replicated next year with a slightly different badge. That is engineered scarcity, and it can be exciting when executed with taste. The rarest cars, however, tend to be rare for reasons that resist replication. A homologation special that exists only because a racing body demanded roadgoing proof will always carry a different gravity than a cosmetic send-off package. A low-mile survivor of an era when most cars were simply used up tells a story about how people lived, not just how they bought. A first-year or last-year configuration with meaningful mechanical changes is a piece of industrial history, not a trim line. And the car that did something - won a race, appeared on the grid, belonged to the person whose name became shorthand - is unique in a way no new production run can mimic.

The simplest test is to ask what remains if you remove the badge, the paint code, and the brochure copy.

If all that’s left is the same car anyone could have bought with a different stitch color, you were buying ceremony. If what remains is a chassis, a drivetrain, a story, and a reason for existing that ties into the arc of culture or competition, you’re in the realm of rarity. Engineered scarcity can create queues and headlines; natural rarity builds provenance over time.

How engineered scarcity actually works (and when it works best)

Engineered scarcity isn’t the villain of collecting. Its a tool for corralling attention, distributing product, and occasionally catalyzing taste. Sneakers are a perfect example. Drop calendars, surprise releases, friends-and-family pairs, and city-specific allocations all manufacture friction. I’ll age myself by saying “it was WAY different when I was a kid…,” but still today, the right combination can create an event, and events are good for culture.

Yet the pieces that age into capital-C collectibility tend to escape the issuer’s script: the pair worn in a moment that mattered, the shoes tied to a trial, a game, a photograph everyone recognizes. Watches play the same game. Retail scarcity, boutique editions, and year-specific dials create heat; prototypes, milestone references, and wrist histories create weight. In whisky, numbered bottles and cask finishes keep things lively, but the objects that bring people to auction rooms a generation later are liquid accidents that cannot be rerun: closed-door distilleries, orphaned casks, and barrels that turned out to be better than any plan.

Art toys and prints occupy a similar frontier. Changing a colorway and stamping a new certificate can extend a run in ways that feel fresh. Sometimes these evolve into legitimate rarities because the creator becomes historically important and the early editions become primary sources. More often, they remain what they set out to be: fun, collectible, and best bought with joy rather than solemnity. The pattern across categories is consistent. Engineered scarcity does its best work building momentum; natural rarity does its best work building moats. Momentum can be rented; moats are owned.

Fossils and deep time: the market’s most honest supply curve

The cleanest laboratory for natural rarity lives in paleontology, where no marketing department can press more inventory. The supply curve is written by geology and luck. 

To get a world-class specimen, you need the right animal in the right rock at the right time, followed by the right sequence of preservation, discovery, excavation, and preparation. At any point, the chain can break. Most fossils are fragments because time is very good at turning bone back into earth. The ones that survive with high completeness are already miracles. Those found in articulation like our Barosaurus (with bones resting in relative life position) are miracles translated into narrative. Layer in taxon rarity - the simple fact that some species appear vanishingly less often than others - and you begin to understand why fossils are a separate language from produced collectibles.

Even within fossils, the hierarchy of rarity is precise. A specimen with strong field notes, bone maps, and stratigraphic data carries scientific integrity alongside market value. The presence of anatomical pieces that almost never survive can redefine both.

In the case of Barosaurus, a complete skull remains the great white whale; none is known, and any cranial discovery would register far beyond the auction block. And unlike a limited sneaker or a boutique watch, none of this can be scheduled for spring or fall. Supply is whatever the rock allows this decade. That makes fossils humbling and clarifying. There is no slider to pull to “create more.” There is only what time has permitted.

Our Barosaurus: why we’re inviting you earlier in the arc

All of this informs how we structure dinosaur offerings on Rally, including the Barosaurus IPO opening October 22. Traditionally, the market encounters dinosaurs after someone else has borne the risk. An institution or a private buyer steps in when there’s a mount on the floor and a story ready to be told. The value jump from promising excavation to museum-grade presentation is where much of the upside happens, and it usually accrues to whoever wrote the first check. We’re opening a lane for our community to participate earlier, while the work is still alive. That means treating geology as the script, not the marketing copy. We communicate completeness as it is known, not as it is wished. We discuss articulation and site conditions in plain terms. We make contingencies explicit rather than turning them into romance. And we price what we can see while leaving what we believe to be genuine upside - such as the possibility of rare anatomical elements - where it belongs: as potential, not premise.

This approach has a second-order effect we care about. It keeps us honest and keeps the market attached to reality rather than rumor.

By working closely with field teams, labs, and institutions, we ground our theses in prep logs and bone counts, not message boards. In a world that can spin narratives out of thin air, dinosaurs anchor us to facts. The difference between engineered scarcity and natural rarity becomes visceral at a ranch face when someone is brushing away sediment, cataloging, and stabilizing material that hasn’t seen daylight in 150 million years. That moment has more in common with an archivist recovering a lost film reel than with a fashion house planning spring colors. It is why we think deep-time assets belong in well-built collections and why we structure them with humility.

Time is undefeated…

When you appraise anything - cards, cars, sneakers, watches, whisky, fossils—ask where the scarcity originates. If the answer lives inside a factory or a marketing calendar, you are likely in the realm of engineered scarcity. There may be real value there, especially when craftsmanship, narrative, and distribution collide, but you should recognize that replacement risk is high. 

Engineered scarcity is a great storyteller. It creates spectacle, builds communities, and, at its best, ushers new collectors into a hobby. But collections that last tend to concentrate around objects that were unlikely to exist in the first place and even less likely to survive. That’s the through-line from a high-grade pre-war card to a homologation legend to a cask that shouldn’t have tasted that good to a dinosaur emerging in articulation from stone laid down when everything familiar to us was impossible.

Natural rarity is the market’s way of acknowledging time.

Barosaurus fits that worldview. It isn’t a seasonal colorway - it’s a convergence of geology and patience being translated into something investors can actually own. If the idea of buying things that time agrees with resonates, you’ll find yourself asking a simpler question at the point of purchase: is this scarce because someone planned it, or rare because time allowed it? We always try to focus on the latter.

Our Barosaurus IPO opens 10/22 on Rally. If you want the full dig on completeness, articulation, and timeline - along with how we structured the offer to respect what’s known while keeping upside honest - click the link below to read the full prospectus… an IPO 150 million years in the making, this month, on Rally.

Until Next Week...