Magic Online

[Simulacrum]

I played a ton of Magic when I was a kid.. I started during unlimited so I actually had a bunch of Moxes and other goodies. I sold a beta lotus for $1000 a couple of years ago.

I still have a massive collection of cards in my closet.. I hope my kids want to play some day, so I kept as many fun, playable cards as I possibly could.

That's awesome you used to own a card shop Tavish... I'm jealous. That would be too much fun.

[Coppermine]

I'll trade you a minotaur for my Andy Van Slyke rookie card.

[acsguitar]

That's awesome you used to own a card shop Tavish... I'm jealous. That would be too much fun.

I think Tavish is the most california of anyone

[Tavish]

That's awesome you used to own a card shop Tavish... I'm jealous. That would be too much fun.

It was a ton of fun for the first couple years. After that it was a real struggle. When I first bought into the shop it was your typical old-school sports card shop. A few glass display cases for the hot single cards, a couple behind-the-counter racks for pack buyers, and another rack with various complete sets. I brought in the Magic crowd that was almost exclusively younger and willing to spend a great deal more money. Within a month the pack racks were completely CCGs, within 3 months the single cases were 95% CCGs. We kept a small space set aside for sports cards for a few regulars who came in looking for either George Brett or Joe Montana singles. After those regulars came in a few times and was surrounded by 20+ teens that hung around for deck tuning pick-up games or tourneys they pretty much stopped coming by.

There were days when I would open the shop up at 8AM and have somebody there waiting who wanted to play a few games with a new deck design. We had an in-house ranking system where you could challenge other people signed up and work your name up the shop's leaderboard so I would take on people challenging me all day, then run a tournament at night and close the shop down around 12AM. I would take my breaks, eat my lunch all while playing Magic so on days like that (which was at least 2 or 3 times a week) I would play Magic almost non-stop for 16 hours a day.

About the only time during work when I wasn't playing Magic was when I was listening to kids parents tell me how their children are spending to much time in my shop, not doing enough of their schoolwork because of the game, and hanging out with a bad crowd we had at the shop. Yet they would still drive 15 minutes to drop their kid off everyday after school so we could be their free babysitter. I even had one parent who work until around 7PM and changed their kids' school bus dropoff to outside the shop. That same parent told me I was being a bad influence on the kids because I was smoking about 2 packs a day.

Overall I had some really great times but I'm really glad I moved on. And even better I moved on right before Pokemon became real popular. The bonus was that when I sold my interest in the shop I got nearly 5X the amount I orginally invested and then sold my card collection for almost 10K on top of that. It sort of made up for the fact that I worked for almost nothing but food and rent money for the time I was there.