Your Bi-Weekly Update with Willis 23-09-2024

Ah it's been a good break. I finally beat my mother at Ping Pong! Only took most of a year or more.

Before I go any further a reminder about the Dunedin Legacy/Modern 12th/13th of October. I'm not certain the event page mentions it but a reminder also that I am putting cash up for first place for the Legacy. Minimum $50, tops out at $200 if we reach at least 24 entries.

So Duskmourn. The Prerelease has just past, what are your feelings on the set. Mine are complicated. From a lore perspective we just went from one of my favourite lore ever (Bloomburrow) to my actual least favourite lore ever (Duskmourn). I don't do gore, I don't do horror, I don't do jump scares. Shit gives me panic attacks. Like on the floor, full on panic attacks that feels like a pain worse than death. I wish I could ignore the set entirely, forget that it exists and crawl away into a ball. But I'm a store. I can't do that. I need to get over it and move on. I've done it before, Demonmail Hauberk has some pretty horrible flavour I'm not really a fan of.

So yeah, Duskmourn, not so much for me personally. Now that's just the flavour. I don't find Gothic and Eldritch horror quite so miserable and can enjoy it, and after Eldritch Moon (and of course innistrad) I think Duskmourn is great for Innistrad.

After we got Gothic and Eldritch the next few times to Innistrad just seemed to be "generic horror, werewolves and vampires" no real direction or direct flavour influences. So I'm glad Duskmourn exists, just once again, really not for me. I won't be drafting it, and for the most part I'll be trying to have as little to do with it as possible outside of work. I won't let my discomfort with the set get in the way of that.

On the topic of work, some of you will have noticed some changes in our buylist prices. My beliefs, and this is how I'm currently running my store, is that as a magic store one of the services we offer is the ability for you to trade in whatever you don't want, and for us to be able to take that from you and make a profit. Be it Damaged Cards (which we take at 10% of our NM price, and only if the card as a buy price of at least $3 otherwise we pay a cent per card), Serialized Promos (which we can't move unless we a physically in another country) and those stupid 30th edition basically proxy Beta cards included.

Now keep in mind when looking at our buylists that for the most part we expect people to sell us cards we don't want and place prices accordingly, and unfortunately our back-end leaves us limited in a lot of customization when it comes to that. If you see a price that you feel is offensively low, come talk to us about it, its often that we can go higher, but it's just caught in one of the places where what we expect is someone selling us a shitty 30th edition beta proxy thing, a serialized foil we can't move, something like a $40 foil Tel-Jilad Stylus or a $1000 Alpha Cockatrice. 

We try to keep the cards that move the easiest, nonfoils from Revised forward at a more competitive rate, but you'll see some outliers and think "WTF why are they only paying $125 on an Expedition Mana Vault" Trust us, we are happy paying more than that, it just sits in the same category as things like random foil apocalypse cards and for whatever reason we run into those more often.

Whew, what a long post. I guess I've had a lot of thoughts building up I wanted to share. I'll be back with a new post in 2 weeks, and I'll see however many of you make it to Dunedin in 3 weeks!

- Rose Willis