Hi all,
I went to the Prerelease at Card Merchant CHCH this weekend and had a lot of fun, I meant to take photos of my decks, but I forgot, so instead you get a photo of the sweetest playmat I've seen in quite some time. If you don't understand it, you really need to watch My Neighbour Totoro (even if you aren't an anime fan).
The second pool was the most rememberable even though it was the first pool I went 3-0. In the second pool I'd built a solid G/B deck. It had 2 of the Nine Lives Cat, some removal, a Vampire Nighthawk, then a solid green base involving the new hydra that has landfall double the +1+1 counters on it, and the bomb that won me the first sealed pool, Sylvan Scavenging. Turns out making a 3/3 Racoon every turn is quite powerful. However I lost every game I played with the deck, though the first 2 I drew 23 lands between the 2 games.
So I swapped to my Meme deck and won every game but 1 I played with it. I called it my meme deck because it was playing very few creatures and 3 6-drop enchantments that realistically did nothing until I untapped after casting them (usually not what you want in Limited). I had 2 Extravagant Replication and 1 Rite of the Dragoncaller.
Now Sealed is often much slower than Draft, added to that is the fact that core sets are usually slower than other sets and at Prereleases a lot of players prefer to build around the shiny new splashy big cards over building decks tuned to win and I basically always untapped with my enchantments. When I did untap with them, nonsense ensued, I'm sure my opponents Kiwa and Sam Gray will be able to describe it best after being on the receiving end of it <3.
Foundations is full of cards that I have nostalgia for and I want to do a blog sometime telling stories about some of my favourites. However, this post is going to be long enough as it is so hopefully next update :).
Now into store updates. Thank you everyone who participated in our moving sale. We increased some of our prices in the middle of it (something I will get to in a sec) but we felt it was vital to you, our customers (not to mention legal) that anyone using the code got the original sale and not just the 10% off our new prices. So whenever we increased prices we increased the amount the discount reduced by that same percentage.
We do intend to have a Black Friday sale as well at the end of the month, we are currently thinking about a sale on our Instock Foils, but I'll have a better idea closer to the time.
On the price increase itself, we had it pointed out to us that looking on mtgsingles.co.nz our prices were perhaps a little too competitive. We want our prices to be competitive but perhaps a little less competitive than they were. Also our new pricing means some of our super expensive foils on the site have become a lot more reasonable (Silver Scroll Foil Nazgul for example only being $100 and not $360).
The other thing we've done is cut the prices on the Chinese New Year Promos (Year of the X cards). Mostly in half as we want to list them at prices people in New Zealand might be interested in them, not at the prices of countries who don't get them. If you didn't know, the Chinese New Year Promos are limited to Southeast Asia, China, Australia, NZ, and a small amount of them in Japanese go to Japan. The cards are not printed is USA or Europe at all, and because most people in New Zealand work off of USA prices it means whenever they pop up for sale they are vastly overpriced so we've reduced ours to reflect that.
One thing you might not know about these promos, even if you were aware of the overly expensive and unrealistic price tag is the Sarkhan Unbroken and the dragon spells cost 1 less guy printed with the first wave of Year of the Dragon 2024 were actually given out everywhere. Including the USA and Europe. I've clipped it's price a little bit, but it turns out that the USA price on that card is, in fact, accurate.
Lastly a reminder that we are moving into a new home. We do so on November 20th, but so that we can focus on Packing and Cleaning we will be closing up the store that whole week (18th-24th). You can still order cards, but nothing will get shipped that week and instead get shipped on the 25th. If you want to garuntee getting cards before then, we recommend ordering by midday on Thursday the 14th of November.
Right, that's me. I'll see you all in 2 weeks!
- Rose Willis
