Death to trading cards!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Suppose you're a store owner or corporate suit and you think your store/company doesn't have enough shrinkage. What should you do about this? Add a trading card section if you don't already have one.

Seriously...it ain't no thang for us to go into the fitting rooms or the bathrooms or furniture and fill up a small wastebasket with empty trading card wrappers. People just take them to these spots and gank any and all cards they want.

Ooh, and we get way too fucking many of them. It seems every other day UPS is dropping off a couple cases full of the damn things and associated accessories. They get checked in by the receiving specialist, checked over to make sure they're priced,and put in a cart for somebody (almost always me) to fill. And then I have to try to cram as much of the shit as I can onto the two rolling racks we put trading cards on, while remembering not to mix the game cards (Magic, Pokemon, Naruto, etc) with the sports cards. If I cannot do this for some reason, I have to send the excess back to the receiving specialist so they can be sent back, which inevitably causes the pitiful excuse of a man of a vendor rep to bitch because we're sending too much back.

And also there's the socially maladjusted losers who always hang around me as I'm trying to stock the damn cards (Author's note: it does not make you a socially maladjusted loser to collect trading and game cards. However, hovering your B.O-ridden ass around me at all times, muttering "Whatcha got dere? Whatcha got dere?" as I'm trying to work, digging through my cart of cards waiting to be stocked and making a mess of it, putzing around with little scales and feeling up the packs of cards like you're trying to get to second base with them, and spending more money on trading cards in a week than normal people spend on personal hygiene products and decent clothing in a year, probably do.)

Today, as I was stocking cards, I had one of these misfits hanging around me the whole time, pawing through my cart like a bear going through a car in search of goodies. One of my co-workers came by and asked me "Is he the vendor rep or something?" Yeah, the company employs as its rep the guy with a Bacardi t-shirt with paint stains and about 37 holes of various sizes and diameter, the greasy, pillow lint-laden hair, and the vaguely poopish smell. You've seen right through his disguise.

[Food Lady]

I really hate the card wall. I don't know anything about that stuff, but they want me to stock/straighten it. At some point someone told me to scan an item for price and stick it on a peg that matches. That's what I do. If the vendor doesn't like it, he can do his own job.

[bainsidhe]

*blink blink* The arrive with little...scales? WTF?

[Andara Bledin]

*blink blink* The arrive with little...scales? WTF?

They're trying to detect the difference in weight between a pack with all standard cards and a pack with a special chase card.

It's really pathetic.

^-.-^

[pitmonkey]

About as bad as the Matchbox cars.

[Plaidman]

Ya know, every single one of my buddies LOVES magic the gathering. They all collected HUGE amounts of them. Other friends of mine collected pokemon cards or yugio.

I love roleplaying. I dream of fantasy. I even CREATED my own card game.

I never once however, played any collectable card games.

People get freaking crazy over that. I've heard stories, and seen news reports of people mugging others over a card, or even brutally beating someone because they LOST at a card game, others where people break down in tears, because someone used a super rare card, that if I remembered right was too be tosed onto a pile of cards, and whatever that card touched, was taken out of the game. The user ripped it up, and shattered the pieces all over.

He was the owner of the rare card, he tore it up, and his oppontants and other watchers cried over that.

[jedikuonji]

People get freaking crazy over that. I've heard stories, and seen news reports of people mugging others over a card, or even brutally beating someone because they LOST at a card game, others where people break down in tears, because someone used a super rare card, that if I remembered right was too be tosed onto a pile of cards, and whatever that card touched, was taken out of the game. The user ripped it up, and shattered the pieces all over.

He was the owner of the rare card, he tore it up, and his oppontants and other watchers cried over that.

The good old Chaos Orb. The idea was you flipped the card like you would flip a coin and whatever cards it landed on were then removed from play. The instance you are talking about is essentially an unconfirmed rumor about someone who tore up the card in an interesting rules exploit. This was actually before anyone really figured that the cards would be worth anything and the rumored result was that it was allowed since there wasn't any rule stating you couldn't tear up your own cards. Everyone except the opponent thought it an excellent strategy.

[jedimaster91]

Now I want to go watch Yu-Gi-Oh.

Anyone ever play Legend of the Five Rings? That is one freaking complicated card game. I had my very own Naga (?) deck and now I can't find it.

[Geekus Rex]

The good old Chaos Orb. The idea was you flipped the card like you would flip a coin and whatever cards it landed on were then removed from play. The instance you are talking about is essentially an unconfirmed rumor about someone who tore up the card in an interesting rules exploit. This was actually before anyone really figured that the cards would be worth anything and the rumored result was that it was allowed since there wasn't any rule stating you couldn't tear up your own cards. Everyone except the opponent thought it an excellent strategy.

Perhaps he just got it confused with Chaos Confetti?

[Becks]

I miss getting baseball cards.

[MoonCat]

They weigh the card packs? Are they sold by weight?? And if not what difference does it make?

I bought one pack of Lord of the Rings cards, way back when....and immediately lost interest in the whole thing. Waste of $10. Oh well.

[jedikuonji]

They weigh the card packs? Are they sold by weight?? And if not what difference does it make?

I bought one pack of Lord of the Rings cards, way back when....and immediately lost interest in the whole thing. Waste of $10. Oh well.

The idea is that the super special foil card will weight a minuscule amount more than regular cards so if you weigh the packs, the one(s) that weigh the most should have your super awesome card in them.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

About as bad as the Matchbox cars.

Oh yeah, those too.

Any time I get in a box of Hot Wheels, first thing I do that day is fill all the pegs as much as they can be filled, and the excess goes right to the backroom.

If I leave the box out on the floor as backstock, the local Hot Wheels goon will go digging through the cart or pallet, no matter how well I have it hidden, just to locate the box and go scrounging through it for the one "valuable" car out of 56,297,885,612,220,946,762,181,322,007,680,943,821 produced that might just be tucked inside.

And he won't put the cars neatly back into the box when he's done either.

[Andara Bledin]

People get freaking crazy over that. I've heard stories, and seen news reports of people mugging others over a card, or even brutally beating someone because they LOST at a card game, others where people break down in tears, because someone used a super rare card, that if I remembered right was too be tosed onto a pile of cards, and whatever that card touched, was taken out of the game. The user ripped it up, and shattered the pieces all over.

He was the owner of the rare card, he tore it up, and his oppontants and other watchers cried over that.

Heh. I've got a few stories of people being weird about M:tG cards.

My ex found out, back in '94, that Magic cards are really hard to burn. He had a M:tG sacrifice and weenie roast event at a park near the site of Origins '94 because we'd gotten a cheap portable grill for filling out a credit card application. One of the attendees threw in one of his Black Lotus cards. A very valuable card at that time. It takes a lot of lighter fluid to get one of those cards to start burning, and even then, they tend to go out a lot.

Another person we know from our gaming conventions was in an official M:tG regional championship tournament. It was a tough round, and he was having a very hard time getting to the point where he could bring out a card he had in his hand. So, he finally gets enough of the right color mana to summon his monster, and in the very next turn, his opponent takes it out. He's so pissed that he eats the card. This was a rare monster and his opponent was aghast. In fact, he was so upset over it that he essentially threw the game because he wouldn't defeat any of the other rare monsters for fear he'd do the same.

My CCG of choice was Mythos, a Call of Cthulhu based card game. My strategy was to go with an overabundance of cheap and easy point accumulation. Very effective.

I've also played Jyhad Vampire: the Masquerade, in which I was the sneaky charming type. Although, after the rest of the group figured out how solid a threat I could be, they tended to gang up on me before turning on each other.

Oh, and then, of course, there's XXXenophile. The boyfriend and I once took the top two spots of this one and the third place guy was pissed. See, we'd forgotten to bring our own cards, so he graciously let us borrow his cast offs to put together a pair of playable decks for ourselves out of what he didn't need. And, since he'd been talking up how much time he'd spent tuning his deck and we both took about five minutes each with his castoffs and then beat him with them, he just couldn't handle it.

^-.-^

[jedikuonji]

I have a couple good magic stories myself.

The first involved a guy I knew that played tourneys regularly. He was playing some obnoxious teenager who was going on and on about his Black Lotus (rare and powerful card). The kid drew the lotus and went crazy with taunts and whatnot and the guy had had enough with the BS. This guy had close to two dozen lotuses and decided to mess with the kid. So...he picked up the card from the table and proceeded to tear it up right there. The kid was just stunned, couldn't even talk, and then he started crying.

The guy was ejected from the tourney for his behavior and did replace the card with one of his. "Best entry fee and card money I ever spent" is how he recalls it.

The second is one of mine. A store was trying to get rid of some of it's extra common cards and decided to do a common draft where everyone paid some money and then build a deck from the common bins. I was at the store for another reason but the owner talked me into playing. At this point I haven't played magic for at least 5 years and the other players had been building decks for over an hour. I told the owner to give me 10 minutes and I'd be good to go.

So I reconstructed one of my old common junk decks from way way back in the days of early magic. I was using cards that were practically old enough to vote and skipped all the newer cards with newer mechanics in favor of the old tried an true. Most of the other players seemed annoyed at having to wait for me to finish, except for one guy, nice high school kid. We chatted while I built and kicked ideas around a bit.

So the tourney starts. High school kid is my first opponent. I have to ask him how many cards I get to draw because I couldn't remember. The other players overhear this and laugh nasty little laughs that seem to say "haha, he's going to lose". We have fun playing and joke around through the match. Eventually I pull ahead and put him away. He thanks me for a good game and we spend a couple minutes talking deck strats while waiting for everyone else to finish up.

That was the only enjoyable and remotely difficult match of the night. Everyone else seemed to be part of the regular crowd and were clearly annoyed at myself and the kid coming in and daring to play in "their" tournament. It didn't help much that I steamrolled them in every match I played. They were suffering from what I call inbred decks; decks designed around playing against each other, all of them with glaring and easily exploitable weaknesses to anyone who isn't one of their usual opponents.

So I walked away undefeated. Prize was the cards I played with (everyone got those) plus a couple starters and boosters from whatever the current set was. I gave everything to the highschool kid since he'd probably get better use out of them. Then I left, satisfied that I had just ruined a bunch of d-bags game nights. I still enjoy thinking about it, hadn't played for years, old school deck, overwhelming victory...ah, sweet.