I want to take some time today to talk about where we are at and some of the changes moving forward.
I love old cards, I love the asthetics of them, I love playing with them, Old School, Premodern, and Legacy are formats that really look fun to me, and the format I play most (as I expect most of you do too) is Commander.
I love to travel. I love seeing new places, spending time with those who I don't get to see so often, and attending events. I miss nationals and PTQ's and other events we used to get.
I love buying and trawling through collections, finding gems that others might have missed. Being able to purchase collections that haven't seen the light of day for years and being able to share them with you. Get them out there into players hands where they will find new love and new use.
My business mentor always said that if you really like something, chances are high that there are others around who are equally pasionate about the same thing.
I've always taken that to heart, and as such we have built up a customer base of people who also like old cards, who also love to play legacy, and of course those of you who love Commander.
The vast majority of cards that come into the store are through collections or from us travelling to events. By focusing on what I love, I have gathered that around me and been able to make a living out of it.
As the magic landscape changes, we have to make some choices. For me I would rather continue down the line I'm passionate about and try to make that work, over following prehaps a more conventional path that prehaps ends up being better in the long run. I hope you agree with me and will continue supporting us through these changes.
The first of these is that we are done opening sealed product for new sets. This has always been a massive loss for us no matter what we open. Between too many sets being released and the constantly increasing prices we've decided we are going to try and put the money we spend here each year to better use.
I've noticed recently that some of the other big stores around New Zealand have increased their prices to be able to afford the cost of cracking sealed product for singles. If we were to continue cracking sealed product we would likely have to follow suit. We decided that we would rather keep our prices lower, but move out of cracking sealed product as a result.
That's not to say we aren't going to try and get in new product when we can, just that we won't have the latest singles on launch weekend.
One of the other changes we are making in this area is we are adding a permanent extra 10% store credit bonus to any nonfoil singles traded in to us from the most recent set release. We hope this will help us in still being able get you the latest singles as fast as possible.
The second of these is that we'd love to travel more. Our travel has mostly been limited to the south island because these are the people we know and a lot the majority of events we attend are places that don't really offer much of the way in terms of singles and that's something we can provide. It's only been in the last year or so that we've really come to appreciate just how much these events mean to us and really want to offer our own support to help these events continue to happen and to thrive.
If you are in a place where having someone bring in fresh cards into a community and taking out stagnant cards rotating between trade folders could be benificial, please reach out to us, we'd love to see if something mutualy benificial could be reached :).
We are also potentially open to the possibility of coming to you if you have a collection that you wish to move and don't have the time or energy to go through it all yourself.
The last thing we've decided to do is add a few more of our HP cards to the store. These cards are sleeve playable without being marked, but beyond that we can't garuntee their condition. We tried organizing these by set in the past and that didn't work out with our systems. However we've decided to have a dedicated HP section that we can pull cards out from especially when someone places an or with HP cards in it. This won't be everything HP we get, but just a few cards that we end up with that would otherwise be lying around not doing much.
As always, we hope you will be pleasantly suprised with the condition of any cards you purchase from us and we believe the HP cards will be no exception.
I hope each year is better for all of us than the last, regardless of how good or bad last year has been to you. I'm really looking forward to what 2024 will bring.
- Rose Willis
