TCG Boom, kittens, and Store/Life Update

What’s up friends and loyal customers! It’s been a while since my last post on here and the time has come for an update. Magic, Family life and health…let’s dig into Magic and the TCG world first.

The TCG market is absolutely bananas right now, it is like the Covid card craze all over again. Fights in Target (and Costco), bots scalping anything they can, and everything is overpriced. So, BUY SINGLES (from spiderstevetcg.com)! Just kidding, buy or don’t buy whatever makes you happy. Pokemon just keeps climbing and climbing, with each new set harder to purchase than the last. I’ve even had trouble securing product from my distributor since I’m just a small store, so for the most part I have been skipping the newer sets. I don’t have time to do it, but Target and GameStop camping is becoming popular in my area again. I remember doing it during Covid with the kids and damn was it awesome getting anything at MSRP. So happy hunting and no fighting!!! The graded card market seems to be strong, or at least I hope it is, as I sent 72 cards to PSA last month. It was mostly modern Pokemon, but there were a couple Magic, One Piece and even a Blue Eyes in the submission. I should have them back by mid-September, so be on the lookout on the site if you are in the market for PSA graded cards. Where to begin with Magic…Final Fantasy somehow had more hype that Lord of the Rings, despite not having a 1/1 card…just a bunch of golden chickens! I’ll admit, I played a lot of games growing up but never delved into Final Fantasy, so for me, I just saw expensive cards, and a few must haves for my personal decks, but no real hype for any of the characters. Hindsight is 20/20, and I should have gone in on more collector boxes when I had the chance to, but I didn’t! Edge of Eternities continued to build on that hype somehow being sandwiched between FF and Spider-man, and it’s a pretty good standard set. The space theme seems to be a big hit and almost everyone LOVES the galaxy foils (me included). We have spacecraft now and the station mechanic, that can create some cool situations in game play (see Dawnshire). Oh and I almost forgot about Sonic the damn Hedgehog! I will have fun with Superstate in my Toski commander deck. I am beyond excited for all of the Spider-man spoilers, as this is a dream set for me (my damn name is SpiderSteve). I have heavily ordered this product, so be on the lookout for preorders. There are many cards and characters that will be a lot of fun to build decks around, including Miles Morales and Anit-Venom. Oh, and the Soul Stone will be an absolute chase in this set, and I would be shocked if there isn’t a serialized version. If that is announced, this set might sell even more than Final Fantasy.

Family life has been great! I am truly blessed with the best wife and two most hardworking sweet boys. Most of our activities seem to revolve around soccer these days, with our “vacation” even being in New Jersey at a beach soccer tournament that I coached, and the boys played in. Both of my sons had very successful Spring seasons, one going undefeated in league play and the other winning the big end of season tournament in Erie. I love being a part of their soccer development and watching them grow and learn with my guidance. The sky is the limit for them, and I will be there every step of the way cheering them on. We had an eventful Father’s Day, I took the family to a local fishing pond and as we were leaving my oldest son found five baby kittens. So of course, we had to take them home and raise them. In the end, we kept two of them, Taco and Poppy, and the rest went to friends and family. We are planning one more summer excursion before the kids go back to school and it involves more fishing, deep in the mountains of West Virginia. It will be nice to get away from everything one more time before life gets hectic again.

Now, onto the heavy stuff. I was accepted into a new cancer treatment trial, my sixth different treatment. I was booted from the last treatment due to the development of a tumor on my brain. I had radiation treatment for that, and it has shrunk in size since it was identified. So, treatment six started with blood washing a few weeks ago and going forward will be the most aggressive treatment yet, so much so that it will involve a three-week hospital stay. It will be difficult to be away from home, my family, my soccer team, and work, but I believe it will all be worth it. It is in phase three of testing, so there is a lot of good data to back it up. During this time, my store, which is operated solely by me, will be accepting orders but not shipping any items. So, get your orders in before August 21^st if you need them in a timely manner. As an incentive for my loyal customers to order in the next couple of weeks, my entire store will be discounted. Starting today, the entire store is 7% off, on August 11^th it will be 8% off, and finally on August 18^th-20^th the entire store will be 9% off. Keep me busy over the next couple of weeks! I will continue to upload EoE and Secret Lair singles, some Pokemon graded cards and even some Pokemon singles AND while I’m in the hospital I intend to continue uploading MTG and Pokemon singles as long as I’m feeling up to it. I have a backlog of around 700 MTG singles, with a lot of bangers! Hopefully, you all will give me a big backlog of orders when I am finally released from the hospital. As always, thank you for being my loyal customers, it brings me job reading your reviews and knowing that these pieces of cardboard I send to your house make you happy. Later!