Quote Originally Posted by Carabas View Post
It's somewhat shady, but not for that reason.

Incentive variant covers are shady because they boost sales without actually selling more copies to readers: the way it works is that retailers order more from the regular issue than they could ever hope to sell so they can also order some of the extra-special deluxe 1/5000 (or whatever) cover they can sell for megabucks on Ebay and still make a profit on the unsellable regular issues.
Thats the mechanics of it but at the end of the chain is someone dropping up to $2k on a manufactured rare (or wanting to but cant afford to). Having seen upwards of a 1000 educational psychologists reports, as a layman, it seems to exploit and exacerbate potentially harmful ocd / mental health tendancies in a certain section of people.