Editor’s Note: Huge shout out/thanks to John Little, http://littlejohnart.com for designing the new banner for the site! Support your artist friends.
It’s 2019, the holidays are largely behind us now, and we’re looking forward to all that the new year has in store for us. But that’s for another day. Today, I want to talk a bit about trading.
A huge part of the original experience in the early days was “how do I get the cards I want?”. No internet. No ebay. No pucatrade. No online retailers at all. In small town Ohio, there weren’t many shops selling singles, so the most common way to get specific cards was to trade for them. At the time, I didn’t even realize that Scrye had prices in them, afterall, why would I buy a magazine when I could use that same money on packs? With no real idea of the monetary value of cards, trading was a dark art that came down to gut feel, what you’d heard about various cards, how badly you needed the card, and how little you cared about the cards you were trading away. I remember trading Vesuvan Doppelgangers for Righteousnesses and Castles and being very happy that I could turtle even better. Now, I’m not going to say that we should all trade for what we want without considering the values of the cards, but I do genuinely miss that simplicity and excitement.
What I am suggesting is that for our first game night of 2019, on 7 January I think that it would be fun for all of us Toronto folks to bring along our trade binders and see if we can all spread some joy as well as get some cool cards for our own collections while we’re at it. Personally, I know that I have more than a handful of cards kicking around that would be better spent in someone’s deck than languishing in my binder/box.
The schedule for 2019 is still up in the air a bit, but I don’t want to waste any time getting us all back in the same room, playing cards, building bonds, and casting fun spells.