Those are beautiful, BEAUTIFUL cels, and even
though I don't know who you are (*thwacks
anonymous poster*), I can safely say that I'm
reeeeeeeally happy for you either way.  You just
don't get much more gorgeous, Aya-wise!

You do bring up a very good point, though, and
I'll do my best to respond.  The value of
animation art is constantly in flux, and can vary
wildly on a very short-term basis.  Yet we collect
anyway, because we're buying a piece of anime
history... of characters or scenes we love... of
permanent, beautifully executed art.  Not an
investment commodity.  To attempt to predict the
cel market is to court frustration and insanity --
you'd need psychic powers to do it properly.

While I'm not going to mention any names, I'll use
one of our forum regulars as my example here, and
I hope they forgive me -- a while back, I had a
handful of stunningly primo sketches from a CG
series which at that point had not yet been
released to the general cel market.  Nor did I
know that they would be, but soon after this
person traded me two of my major wishlist cels for
a couple of them, a big block of sketches from the
same show did turn up across the dealer landscape.
 With the expected effect on price.

Which puts me on both sides of the coin at the
same time -- on the one hand, as a buyer, I look
at the price I originally paid for the sketches
when they were pretty much unique to the market,
and at the seriously fractional price of similar
quality sketches only a month or so later once
they were released, and I think "hey, OW."  (Of
course, given how much I loved the exact images I
got, I would have been likely to buy them anyway
even if I'd known... these were indeed scrumptious
sketches.  But that's not the point of this
monologue, heh.)

On the other hand, there's how I feel as a
"seller" -- I traded them away before the flood of
inexpensive sketches, and received two primo cels
in return.  At the time, it seemed relative and
fairly equitable, but just a few weeks later, an
odd sort of guilt set in.  Although there's no way
I could have known that the sketch values would
drop dramatically in the near future, I
nonetheless now felt that I'd gotten the unfair
advantage in our deal, and that feeling has
persisted to this day.

Wow, do I have a point here?  *thinks*  Yes, I
believe I do.  If you saw a cel you wanted, and
thought the price was worth it, and bought it (or
started to buy it), but then found a similar one
for less... does that really make the first one
worth any less TO YOU?  Price in this hobby is so
incredibly subjective to begin with, your feeling
for the cel seems to be the most important part to me.

If the financial aspect of the situation ruins
your enjoyment of the cel, it might be worth
backing out of the deal despite possible
consequences, because there's nothing worse than
$700 worth of acetate in your binder that you
can't bring yourself to look at without feelings
of resentment.

But oohhhhh, if you look at that cel you bought
and it still makes you happy, then it was
worth whatever price you paid and to hell with
what somebody else might sell a similar one for.

Just my two cents' worth, and you can feel free to
tell me I'm crazy.  *grin*  But after "buying
high" much of my Slayers collection during the
peak of the show's popularity, I can safely say
that I regret very little of it, despite its
current, lesser value.

Because leafing through those binders never fails
to make me smile, and that's worth every penny.