who's outbidding you?

For the first time in a while, I tried to win some cels on Yahoo Japan. For some cels, I notice that the bidder's list is jam-packed with deputy services for foreign bidders.

For others -- even shows which are available in the US and other countries -- the bidder's list is almost exclusively Japanese.

My curious question of the day is, "In the shows you collect, who do you most often get outbid by, a Japanese bidder or an foreign deputy service? Who tends to overpay more (by your personal experience)?"

Since I collect stuff that is kind of unpopular, I tend to know who I'm bidding against. I tend to get into it with Cel Hunter J when it comes to bidding on Blue Gender Cels. Seeing as we are both in the USA, we are bothing using proxies.

There has been a single situation where I got into a bidding war with a random Japanese bidder. I was actually shocked because I'm used to only fighting it out with J when it comes to cels from this series.

The Japanese bidder went to town on this one particualr cel I was interested in. It was the only time I have seen a cel of Marlene go above 9000 yen. When it was all said and done, the auction ended at something like 12500 yen. I have never seen a sane collector of Blue Gender pay that much for a normal cel...

Well..I know on eBay that there is this one person who always has an extremely high proxy bid, and I'm never able to pass it...everytime I see their name on the bid history I say to myself "forget it!" ^_^

For the anime that I tend to be interested in, the most competitive bidders tend to be japanese now. However, I have become more selective with cel purchases and am generally willing to go the distance for cels that I want as they are fewer and far in between now.

Since I tend to collect the popular stuff, or rather, stuff that seems to have gotten popular ever since I decided to collect it, (ignore that, it's an ego-thing) everyone and their cat are bidding against me.
The upside is my competition doesn't consist of only one or two nemesisesisieses. I think I'd go bonkers if I had to compete with the same bidder each time.