This weekend we will have part two of the prerelease/release for March of the machines, and I can report that the set is hella fun! (We actually had a near full house on last Friday).
Plus I’m gonna do something on Saturday at 2ish that is spectacularly stupid.*
Aside from pretty epic story-telling, the last couple of Magic sets see to be getting more and more fun to play, and March of the Machines looks to keep that trend going . (If you wanna check out the set in a fun way, do some practices drafts/sealed using Draftsim.) Remember to get tix in advance to save the extra $5…$35 day of event, $30 in advance, so get tix at store or online early)
About 4 months ago, Wizards did an epically stupid thing in creating the $1000 30th Anniversary Edition with “reprints” of most of the important cards they promised they would never reprint. About a month ago they sent us the copy they promised each of the local game stores.
What: On Saturday I’m gonna take them and do something on camera that I’ve banned from the store. We’re gonna play Rip it or Flip it.
Why!!!: I’m not actually being that “flip” about this. With each pack we rip, I’m going to publicly call out Wizards for some things they are doing that are as bad to LGS’s as the Open License debacle was for D&D developers. I’m hoping if this gets enough attention, it might spark some changes here as well.
This is gonna be our bulletin board for updating sales and events for the holidays. But before I do that and smile and remind you that us local businesses need you guys big time to stay alive, I’m gonna get on my usual soapbox about Black Friday Sales.
Don’t let big retail (or even me) force you to give up time with yer loved ones, or a rare and well deserved sleep in, just to get out in a crowd, or stuck to a screen to buy stuff! We will have sales, but they will last into the week after, so you can come in at your leisure. We will be open extra hours and running extra events during thanksgiving, so feel free to come in. We’re just not gonna stand outside your door, screaming for attention.
Speaking of the events and stuff…here is the first installment on what is going on:
A couple of special things this week
Magic Brother’s War Release weekend events all weekend, including Two Headed Giants Sat and Sun-using prerelease kits for extra fun
D&D…special Events For experienced (16+) D&D players on Mon, Tues and Friday. Get a chance to play at the high levels (finally) for Turkmageddon! Limited number of players and long (5-6 hour) sessions.
Lot’s of sales/deals and new stuff coming in this week—rather than just give you a few now here are a couple of places to look to see where the new stuff is updated
Also, we will start taking a bunch of pics of the new stuff as it comes out, as well as special sales on our Instagram account, d20gamesalameda.
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About the D&D Event
Turkmageddon
3 Days of advanced D&D*
Mon 11/21 6pm to 11–10th Level
Tues 11/22 10am-3pm–15th Level
Friday 11/25 10am-3pm–20th Level
$45 in advance/$50 at the door
*For experienced players age 16+
Limited to 8 players per table.
D20 Games is Proud to announce our first Event Campaign: Turkemageddon! Join us for three separate chapters in this holiday themed mini-campaign! Each chapter will be a concise adventure for high level characters with a contiguous story that will weave through and connect each chapter. While it is a campaign Turkemageddon is structured with a drop-in approach allowing players to decide which adventures they would like to take part in. For those who wish to play a character through all three events there will be an in-game gap of five years between each installment to allow for leveling and verisimilitude.
Monday November 21st: Vengeance Most Fowl
We will begin our story on Monday November 21st with Vengeance Most Fowl, an adventure designed for a
party of level 10 characters who find themselves caught between the machinations of a prideful tyrant and the
vengeance of an Eldritch god.
Level 10 characters built with the standard array ability scores (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8).
Characters may be built with any official WotC 5th edition books. No homebrew or playtest material.
A list of level appropriate magic Items will be made available before we begin play.
Tuesday November 22nd: Attack on Gourmand
On November 22nd the next adventure, Attack on Gourmand, is designed for a party of level 15 characters
captured by a colossal chef who intends to use them in his piece de resistance.
Characters should be leveled up to or built at 15th level with the standard array ability scores (15,14, 13, 12, 10, 8).
Characters may be built with any official WotC 5th edition books. No homebrew or playtest material.
A list of level appropriate magic Items will be made available before we begin play. Magic items
acquired in the previous session will not count against new magic items for this session.
Friday November 25th: Turkemageddon
In the third and final installment of the campaign on November 25th, the party, now composed of 20th level
characters, must face their most treacherous foe yet in the titular Turkemageddon.
Characters should be leveled up to or built at 20th level with the standard array ability scores (15,
14, 13, 12, 10, 8).
Characters may be built with any official WotC 5th edition books. No homebrew or playtest material.
A list of level appropriate magic Items will be made available before we begin play. Magic items
acquired in the previous sessions will not count against new magic items for this session.
Two Headed Giant on Sat moves from 3pm to 4pm start time.
D&D is coming back…
Return of Drafting for FNM:Starting 10/22 we will experimenting with doing drafts again for Friday Night Magic. We’ll be pulling out the plastic tablecloths (the ones we used for birthdays) so we can sanitize them in between rounds, and we will have everyone sanitize hands before they start drafting (and have a no drinks or anything that will get hands next to a mouth during the drafting process). If I think this is going well, this is what we will do from now on.
We have also raised the price of the drafts to $20. (The packs have gotten more expensive and we have a much more limited number of players we can have for the events so we really need every dollar we can to start to clime out of the joy and fun of last year). But I’m going to do this. For all of our old players, if you also were pushed to the limit from last year or just can’t afford the price increase, tell us at the counter and we’ll let you keep doing the old $15 for at least the next few months.
Two Headed Giants moving from 3-4 on Saturdays:
We’re shifting the time for the two headed giants back to the old time of 4pm, so it returns it to being more of a date night, evening fun activity. This really is one of our favorite events and we will be doing it consistantly to get it back up and running. (Still have to have the 12+ age limit, but as soon as the vaccination for the younger folks comes in, we’ll happily open the doors to let them back).
D&D in person is starting back up:
This Sunday (10/24) is going to be Dan’s return to DMing events in the store. The time will be 2-7 and will be limited to 7 players. This event will be a 4 session run and should be good fun. This is for players with some experience playing, not a first time event. $20 pers session (and if you want to come to all 4, probably best to get tix in advance)
“We will be doing a Dungeon Crawl into an Abandoned Dwarven Keep . Players Should Create a Level 5 Character using Standard array or the pound buy system in the players hand book. Players will have standard starting equipment as well as any 1 Uncommon Magic item of their choice. Any Player resources and books printed by Wizards of the Cost will be allowed including unearthed arcana.”
Starting in about a week we will start doing Weds D&D and after that, late night Saturday
Pokémon:
Pokémon continues to be in extremely short supply. We are continuing to let 12 and younger kids buy 1 pack a day at the old 3.99 price so they don’t get totally overrun by the adults who are snapping everything up. I’m sorry for not having preorders for all the higher end stuff, but we don’t know until the last minute what will come in. If you want Pokémon gifts for the holidays, I really reeaally recommend getting them now. The supply chain is truly messed up and hits this stuff hard.
Hope to see you this week and as always…seriously thanks for shopping local.
Ben
P.S. We will be spreading out sales/offerings over November so we don’t have to get people to waste part of their vacation running around shopping.
Sealed event using the prerelease kits from the latest Magic Release. Players can get their boxes of 6 packs to open and get to build their decks starting 1 hour before each event. (we provide the land and stuff, so you don’t need anything more to play.) We pride ourselves that no one here will make you feel anything but welcome (we all started from scratch at some point).
This weekend we have 5 most excellent events that we are gonna hold in as safe a way as possible and with all sorts of bonus goodies for those who attend, including a Special D&D event one shot event on Sunday.:
Modern Horizons 2 “Prerelease” (Sealed event using the prerelease kits that we’ve been holding since covid started), $60 in advance, $65 at the door.Friday 8/27 @ 6:30
Two Headed Giant/Fat Pack Wars returns!!! Sat 8/28 @ 3pm (We bring out the mystery box, and each team has a player reach in and pick a surprise pack for whatever Fat pack/bundle they get to use to build their decks together.) $30 in advance, $35 at the door
D&D Epic One shot, Lair of the Dracolich (up to three parties at different tables come from different places to try and survive to defeat something that will take all of them cooperating.) $60 in advance, $65 at the door. Extremely limited seating (only 18 max)
13+ and Vax cards required for all(and masks still)
As we’ve bemoaned earlier, a whole mess of people who’ve been talked into proving they have the freedom to lemming off of a cliff, have put us back to needing to be ultra careful. To attend events here safely, you must bring proof of vaccine (and still wear masks). I don’t mess with this stuff at all, so we will be very strict about this. And I hate it means that the 12 and under kids can’t participate yet. Really hate it. (probably why I’m extra grumpy about this.)
I know for me, going out to an event felt fairly nerve wracking, in delta land. So we really will be extra careful. Therefore, we’re gonna treat snacking like smoking….need to step outside if you need to breath outside a mask.
The good part…Goodies (10th anniversary style)
So everyone who attends events this weekend (and for as long as I feel like it), will get a ton of bonus goodies, from special promo magic cards for the magic folks, to mystery dice sets for the D&D participants.
Tenth Anniversary Magic events…We’re gonna do the #$^#ing prereleases that we missed while we where bunkered up last year! I’m also gonna be cracking out just a ton of promo cards and other giveaways. The events are gonna be a lot smaller than they used to be, also to keep everyone safe. Buy Tix here…
Because of the new variant restrictions, we decided to wait till the first week of August to open up to in person events. It also means that for the next month we are going to separate the vaccinated (13+), and the can’t be yet (12 and younger). (And yes..you need to bring the vaccination card for confirmation. I know it is being overly cautious, but D20 will be a safe place, whatever we need to do, and hopefully people will figure out how to do the right thing sooner then later. Also mask mandates are back, so crack ’em out, wash ’em out and take ’em out (to us).
We meant to reopen at the beginning of August to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the store. But they went and released a new magic set that combined Magic and D&D so we snuck open early to be able to run some events. We are doing events all through the weekend of July 24th.
So here is the scoop with magic events through the end of August:
We have missed 6(!!) in person prereleases during covid lockdown…we’re gonna do them all over the next month (and we will do them again till the next set comes out!
Starting on the last week in August when we do Core 2021 prerelease events all weekend.
Bringing back Two Headed Giant! This is my fav form of magic….great for buddies, couples and parent kid combos)
Keeping things safe. (really)
We’re gonna do Sealed instead of Draft for all events including FNM till the end of August. Both because we got all these fun prereleases we didn’t do, and because I want to be overly cautious and not have people passing cards around to each other.
Vaccination cards required for everyone 13+ for events in the store. I’m really not kidding about this. I’ve spent the last year an a half making choices to keep people safe, including waiting to open up. I’m not gonna be a place where variants get a chance to bounce around. Anyone who disagrees can feel free to email me and I will politely discuss it with them.
12 and under and 13+ events. Because there is no current way to get kids under 12 vaccinated, the best solution is to separate the events. Each weekend there will be at least one event that will be set up for the younger crowd. Adults (parents, etc) are welcome to attend, but will be advised to wear masks and MUST have their vaccination cards with them. PS, I know there are a ton of kids that have both the skill and temperament to play with the adults…they will get to do so again when things settle down.
Smaller (but more) events. To keep the airflow good and give people much more space between each other, we are going to do much smaller event sizes. To help with making sure that no one shows up to not be able to play, we will have event tix available online. (We’re trying a new POS, so this is gonna change in what it looks like, but not what happens.
Silver Chaos Loot Bags: $50 (12 random packs—good for 2 person 6 pack sealed, or 3 people 4 pack mini sealed.) Plus mystery bonus $50-80 value
Gold Chaos Loot bag: $100 (A pair of random prerelease kits and a mystery bundle. Plus a mystery extra magic goody.) $120-160 in value.
Platinum Chaos Loot bag: $200 ( A booster box, fat pack, two prerelease kits, and an extra surprise worth at least $50)$230-270 in value.
Diamond Chaos Loot bag: $500 ( A booster box, one of the Analogy sets, Archenemy, 4 prerelease kits, 4 brawl decks and a Conspiracy booster box, and whatever else I decide to toss in.) $550-800 value
As usual, call first to make sure I’m around . We (I) will get ready to bring it for curbside when you get here. Hours are whenever I’m here, so just call.
(I stared this at the beginning of the week before the CDC recommendation for everyone to wear masks….this is a list of the best links for DIY masks I’ve found. PLEASE comment back on which ones are better and send others that you find, I’ll keep the list updated as much as I can.)
We’ve all heard about the mask/materials shortages for hospitals, and its been sticking in my craw that we’re stuck at home with the impulse to help but nothing to do besides trying not to drive each other crazy. So when I heard about people sewing masks at home to help out, that seemed pretty like a pretty cool use of creativity. I can’t do it, but I can help figure out what is real, vs. nonsense, and try and spread the word. The interesting thing is that even masks that are not of medical quality are of value. Turns out that tea towels are pretty close to fancy medical grad material in terms of catching virus side stuff. And even if it doesn’t do that, it helps with one of the biggest sources of spread, the almost impossible task of not touching yer damn face/mouth during the day. What I’ve included is the links to resources that I’ve found, following the contents of a letter that just came to me from a member of a Kaiser task force on what is acceptable designs for them to use to help with their medical professional. They would like masks for their local Kaiser centers, but obviously, get them to where ever they need to go. Probably best to wash them, and put them in ziplock bags after extremely carefully cleaning…we don’t wanna pass the virus on in something designed to keep it out…too stupidly ironic. If you find better information or improved designs, leave a comment or email us at [email protected]. And if you do end up making one, send us a picture and tell us where it went and we’ll share it. I know it seem like it’s too big for us to do anything about this besides hide in place, but there are a lot of us. 😉
From Kaiser (3/27/2020)
Materials that should be used to make the mask:
Must be able to hand or machine wash when soiled or contaminated
Approval/Distribution:
Regional approval of masks is not needed if volunteers follow instructions and design components provided
Masks will be distributed locally (to medical centers)
We are extremely grateful for your willingness to help our organization keep our patients, members, visitors, staff and physicians safe.
Other Resources I’ve found for this…
How to make your own face mask to help stop the spread of the coronavirus
The CDC recommends you cover your mouth to protect yourself and others from the coronavirus. Here’s a pattern and instructions to make a face mask.
Sewing your own face mask? Some fabrics work better than others, finds new research
What is the best fabric to use to sew your own face covering? Here’s how to sew your own face mask at home.
Calling all makers: Here’s a 1-page PDF facemask pattern; Now go make some and help beat this thing
The best YouTube videos to help you make a DIY face mask
Collection of YouTube instructional videos for making masks from Mashable.
How to make your own coronavirus face mask — including a no-sew one
DIY coronavirus mask instructions from crafters and doctors.
Coronavirus: Deaconess asks public to sew CDC-compliant face masks for staff
Citing shortages, Deaconess Health System asked the public to sew face masks for staff fighting coronavirus.
DIY face masks during COVID-19
A U of M alum is providing community health care solutions during COVID-19.
100 Million Masks
The global demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) has created a severe shortage of PPE across the world. While regular distribution channels ramp up, we need to act now to ensure caregivers have the isolation masks they need to do their jobs safely.
Calling All People Who Sew And Make: You Can Help Make Masks For 2020 Healthcare Worker PPE Shortage
If you want to rally the world to your cause, think like a little bird and tweet. Hospitals and doctors are reaching out via social media to ask for mission-critical help in solving the shortage of N95-type masks during the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Photo: Kately Bowden
DIY Cloth Face Mask
DIY Cloth Face Mask: UPDATE 5This update is care of two wonderful DIY folks from this community:1. Since printers tend to slightly shrink or enlarge documents, and since one size mask does not fit all, Winko has created scalable vector based files! More info about t...
Homemade Masks In A Time Of Shortage
Due to the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, there has been a huge shortage of N95 masks. [Paddy Robertson] from Smart Air has been working on designs for a DIY mask that may be able to protect those…
I just got an email from someone looking for a place to have his 12 year old son to come and play Yugioh, and I was about to tell him the tale of why it is banned at the store, and why I recommend steering him away from Yugioh when I realized that it’s been a long time since I told the story and it was probably worth putting it where everybody could see.
Yugioh is one of the big collectible card games, and was a pretty big part of the store when I acquired it back in 2011. We would get 40-60 people coming in on Sundays, and it represented about 1/3 the business of the store. But I gave it a partial ban in 2012, followed by a complete ban after we had the big break in that almost killed the store.
The day D20 was broken into
So Why Ban Yugioh?
So with all due modesty, I’m a good guy, and have a firm but gentle touch with people, including tweens and teens. (I used to teach Karate to kids.) I can pull people aside and talk to them about behaviors that are not ok without shaming them or making them feel angry or resentful. And I spent a lot of time getting to know the community, participating and getting to know the individual players. But our Yugioh days contained 90% of the trouble we had at the store. It seemed any deck or cards left attended would be stolen the moment someone’s back was turned, we had a huge amount of issues with people taking advantage of others in trades, bad language and people getting really angry, sometimes to the point of fights over games.
After the break in, I went to a big conference of game store owners from around the country and was shocked to find out that the problems we had had were present at stores as far away as Philadelphia, and were only with Yugioh. I spent a long time trying to figure out why this was…it was just a game, after all. Finally I came to a theory, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I became convinced it is correct. There seems to be a fundamental design flaw in the game end’s up not only fostering, but training bad behaviors. Those have become part of the tone/culture of poor behavior/ethics that riddles the Yugioh community.
Yugioh-Magic “fixed”?: Yugioh was invented by a guy that was an old Magic player. He hated the idea of what’s called set rotation. (Basically, only the last couple of years of cards are used in the most common competitive format.) He wanted all the cards that were created in his game to be used all the time. The problem with that has to do with the nature of collectible card games. See the cool part of these games is that there are basic rules, but the new cards get to introduce new rules that change the game. That’s really great, but as you get more and more rules, if you aren’t careful, you get combos of the card that just came out with a card from 5 years ago that becomes powerful enough to break the game. Games like Magic the Gathering and Pokemon spend a huge amount of time looking out for these kinds of combos, but Yugioh doesn’t do quite as good a job. Add that by having all the cards available to play with, after a few years the game started to be defined by these game breaking combos. What it meant was the best decks don’t just win, they utterly crush not so great decks.
Badly training the Young; So here is where things start to go wrong. Imagine you are a 8 or 9 year-old, taking your first deck to go play with your buddies at school. You don’t just lose, you get crushed. You go home to your parents, tears in your eyes from the humiliation. If your parents have means, they come to a store like we used to be and buy better cards so they don’t have to see that look again. If not, the kid has several choices.
“This game is stupid, I’m not playing it anymore”. Probably a good choice, but kids aren’t usually wired that way.
Trade for better cards. This seems good on the surface, but the cards they need are worth many, many times what the cards they have are worth. So they end up learning, at a pretty early age, to take advantage of less knowledgeable players. This is something we deal with directly in all of the collectible card games, and when a kid gets taken advantage of, they can either decide to talk advantage of the next person or to never make anyone else feel as bad as they do now. It is one of the fundamental building blocks to becoming an honest person or not.
Stealing: See the deck that beat them in the kids backpack….
This isn’t the majority of kids that end up down a bad path, but it is enough that starts to seriously influence the ethics of the community. There are a couple of additional things about the game that complete the story.
Lotto Packs. All collectible card games have the “oh, what’s in this one” aspect that has been part of collectible cards since baseball cards. It’s true of Magic, Pokemon, etc. But Yugioh is an extreme with this. It was well known that of a box of 24 packs had about 8 that were were worth anything at all. It was totally common to watch people open packs, look for the ultra rare and throw the rest of the pack out if it wasn’t there. With this level of gambling mentality, it affects how people view the ethics of trading.
Turn one win fury: With all the combos that could win the game running around, it becomes almost a coin flip to see who finds their combo first. If you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on your deck and your opponent gets his combo out first and locks you down, people tend to get, shall we say, cranky. This is why we had so many near fights during tournaments.
“Dealing” trading cards: Because the cards that make these auto win combos are so critical in playing, they become fairly valuable. Add this to the culture of it being ok to take advantage of other people during trades, and you get people that are acting almost like the not so great version of dealers with the valuable cards.
Unclear Rules=different kind of players. The unspoken truth of the kids who really learn to play Pokemon and the Magic players is that it tends to attract fairly intelligent people. Trying to figure out how to make different rules work together is a super interesting and challenging thing to do. The rules on the Yugioh cards can be so difficult to understand and obscure that instead of people figuring out their own cool things, they hear from someone else how that new cool deck work. That means that you get a fairly large percentage of the community that plays just for the chance to beat each other, or to try and make money off their wheeling and dealing for cards. There is often a more aggressive group of players that joins then what you would imagine would be attracted to playing a non gambling card game.
Not all Yugioh Players are bad, but enough: I’m not saying that this affects everyone, or even the majority of players. But it does change the tone of the community, the ethics and how they treat each other. I believe this enough that even though Yugioh was a full third of my business, I made the decision, as both a store owner and a father to ban the game utterly from the store. This was not something I did lightly or without a great deal of thought and consideration. Not only no sales, but no Yugioh cards are allowed at the store, and I actively do my best to encourage kids away from playing the game. I’m sorry for the good folks who like the game, but after 5 years, I have never regretted it, and to answer a frequently asked question, will never bring it back to the store. (I could use my access to sell it online and make a decent profit, but once I believed it was a bad influence, as a dad, I couldn’t do even that.)
But my kid wants to play Yugioh: For parents who’s kids (frequently Pokemon players who are looking to move on) are getting interested in Pokemon, I would strongly suggest gentle urging towards Magic instead. (You can bring them in and I’ll provide parental support. I may be the Peanuts “wah, wah” parents to my own kids, but for other kids, I’m the guy behind the counter at D20. I can use that bully pulpit to help with this so they don’t just end up seeing it as forbidden fruit.) Magic was the first of the games, and has the good stuff of the collectible card games, (social interaction, really using your brain, etc.) without that level of negative side effects. Probably the best feature is they can do what is called limited play. (Basically show up and do events where they play with the cards from the packs they get as part of the event. Everyone starts even, and it is a chance for them to play with the packs they collect. There are even team events that can be played with a buddy or even parent.) You still want to make sure they trade fair, and are get interested in the playing, not just opening packs, but it’s a good choice I have no problem recommending. Tell you the truth, I hesitated talking publicly about my observations about Yugioh, because I didn’t want that to get generalized unfairly to the rest of the collectible card games.