Alan

Standard Peppermint, aka "Flag"

At some level - yes. When sold online, they should be described. Personally, I don't subscribe to the "as-made" trend that has been popularized

A nice, simple combination of colors. Very pleasing to the eye. It avoids the increasingly common fetish for 5+ colors with extra glittery junk added to it to make it look like a carnival ride.

Its a damaged machine made. Try to not look at damage or imperfections as "pontils".

Vintage, but the pics are out-of-focus and the light off the surface looks....odd. Look closely to see if its been polished.

Vintage. Somewhat lighter imprint. Fine marble.

Champion furnace

It was a vintage generic jobbers box of the day. I have the same one in light pink. Akro jobbers seemed to use them, although not exclusively.

Respectfully, I think that is quite speculative without a real tie. I have seen two Akro worker personal "take home" accumulations. One I saw in-person in the former Akro employee's home. They were nice examples of production types with an eye towards quality. It was only ~200 pieces in total. But not one piece was marginal or problematic in any way. The second set was only via Roger Hardy. He had purchased some from a different Akro employee. These also were special examples with an good, practiced eye for quality and pattern. A very few types were unusual enough that they were obvious departures from what we expect - but all with a lot of eye appeal (like Imperials with a lot of glass action). One of those are what Roger referred to as "Opaque Sparklers", of which I bought a few. I still have all of the employee examples I secured through Roger Hardy. Popeyes were corkscrews. When the spinner cup wasn't working they came out as patches. Given the thousands that I saw dug, its obvious that Popeye patches failed production pattern quality control and were discarded. I've never seen a Popeye patch in intact original packaging. On another note, the main digs at the Akro site ended before some seem to think. I visited the site several time during the main digs and have a fair sense of them.

Ravenswood

It really doesn't matter. They exist in huge quantities and one can't be differentiated from another. Its actually amazing that anyone would pay more than a dollar for one.

As I have mentioned before, I saw an entire wood Army footlocker 90% full to the top edge of just dug Popeye patches. It was an astonishing number of them. The guy just couldn't get anyone to buy them cheap and haul them off. There is a monster amount of these out there.

I'd want to see traceability before I believed any of that. Anyone can invent a story.

Fried marble. A fried a few in my day.

A Popeye patch is a Popeye where the spinner cup didn't spin or otherwise produce a corkscrew.

Patch, not a Popeye.

First - I'm not telling other people what to think, or do. People come to this hobby with different intentions, level of interest and commitment and resources. Reading your post, I see huge differences between how you came to the hobby - and how I arrived. That may be cause of very different perspectives. I gained my experience in Identification at shows. I usually go for 3 days, and spend 16 hours/day in the room and hallways looking at every marble, talking about them, understand how to accurately identify it - almost always with 1-3 other people in the conversations other than the owner. For a decade there was a group of hard-core collectors at the New Philly and Amana shows that would lock the door of a room around 11Pm and we would open our cases and pass key marbles around and examine and discuss them with intense study until 4:00AM. We would see and handle everything. Its was amazing what came out of the woodwork. We would spend time on rare stuff, strange stuff, errors, dug material, manufacturer ephemera, boxes spanning everything imaginable. It was called the "4AM Club". Les Jones, Bill Cokenhauer, Albert from WV - about a group of 10. And that was on top of spending all day in the rooms and hallways. The ability to learn at a phenomenal pace was right there - and you came to know whose opinion to totally rely upon. When someone didn't know, they said so. That was your reputation. Posting pics of a pile of marble on the Internet asking for ID is so fraught with piecemeal error, guessing and just plain speculation with no real basis is a helluva way to learn. I realize that there are a lot of people that don't go to shows - maybe never have or will. That (IMO) is a shame because they are left to the wilds of the Internet ID threads. And we have the hi-jinks of the recent $3,000. Jabo thread Cyclone/Cobra thread and its many infamous predecessors. I won't even get started on Facebook silliness where everything seems UV light reactive, thus making it rare and valuable. I didn't have to suffer the common ID innacuracies that many have had to drag themselves through. I was able to learn quickly in the areas I was interested in surrounded by the most experienced people in the hobby. In-person ID lessons in small expert groups transcends the common way-out-of-focus ID pics that the so common now. I'm not telling people not to buy 50-cent marbles. I'm just saying that I don't want to - because I know what those become to me. And personally, I don't prefer to use them as piecemeal ID fodder. I know there is a much, much better way to learn - and build bonds with face-to-face dealings at show. Just my personal preference. Other come to the hobby in different ways.

More like that I listened to early advice that it was better to buy one $40. marble that I really liked, instead of 40 - $1.00 marbles that looked kind of interesting.

I've always been pretty focused in the types I collect, though they range from handmades, machine mades and contemporaries. I have always avoided "strays", unless I absolutely HAD to take them as part of a deal. Then I moved them out cheaply and quickly at shows. I still have a few around, but not enough to be worth finding them.

Agree, Master

x3

Those marks are play damage from impacts.

The combined glass doesn't match with Akro marbles that come to mind.

I have zero reason to believe that it is MK. Zero.

I'll just note that "asking" are not "sold" prices. Don't feed the inflation intent.