I like to play MtG, and some of those cards are expensive as fuck, while others cost pennies, but they literally are all require equivalent amounts of labor. I also saw a Louis Vuitton dice case that costs $720. I’m no expert on dice cases, but I highly doubt it took significantly more labor than any other dice case I could buy at Walmart. Also how does artificial scarcity affect prices, and how does that work with LTV? Like, amiibos, for instance, iirc, are very expensive simply because Nintendo doesn’t want to make very many.
TL;DR why come some things so expensive? Even if they use the exact same amount of labor as less expensive things?
According to the LTV, the production price of a commodity is determined by the aggregate of average socially necessary labour-times but the price of the commodity in the market is still subject to fluctuations based on supply-demand and cultural phenomena.
Okay, so it’s about production price rather than the price a thing sells at?
It’s about value to be precise. But value itself manifests in an abstracted form (the price) in the market. I said production price here because in most cases there isn’t an inflation in price due to scarcity or monopoly in the manufacturing process of MTG cards. That happens after the WotC sells card packs to game stores, card sellers for sale to players/collectors and the second-hand sales after this.