Releasing Octobar 31st.
![]() |
|
|
|
|
|
The blog for news, events, releases and commentary from Castle Perilous Games & Books. located in downtown Carbondale IL. New posts every Monday and Wednesday.
Releasing Octobar 31st.
|
![]() |
|
|
|
|
|
Distribution problems with Wizards and Magic have just exacerbated (See “Reality Fracture Shipping Times Fractured”). Unlike with the Hobbit, I did not read of any stores not getting prize Play boosters for Reality Fracture in time for the pre-release. However, the delivery window for pre-release kits was the shortest I can remember. Typically, kits arrived 1-3 days before pre-release Friday. With Reality Fracture, our pre-release kits did not arrive from UPS until about 1 p.m. on Friday and I read of stores whose kits were delivered 10 minutes before the store had scheduled the start of their first pre-release. Based on UPS tracking I was unsure as to whether our kits would arrive on time for our pre-release weekend.
I hope Hasbro and Wizards are taking a hard look at their supply chain problems and that the oversupply of Pokemon 30th Anniversary product makes it to hobby game stores, which based on the calls we have had at the store and comments online, could certainly sell them.WotC announced a number of changes to its booster packs, starting with the Nautcis release in early 2027. Play boosters are now just boosters, God packs, last seen during the Theros block, make a return with a chance of 1 in 300 in collector boosters and 1 in 1000 in regular boosters. Collector boosters will lose 2 common and one uncommon card, dropping their card count to 12 and regular boosters will no longer have a guaranteed foil in every pack as only mythic rares and rare cards will now have foil treatments.
We have seen the current state of the trading card game market before. At least twice. After Magic released in 1993, 1994 and 1995 saw a huge number of trading card games hit the market. None of them are widely played today and players either buy extremely limited print runs that are one and done or play with digital cards. We saw a second run in the early 2000s with the success of Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh. Once again, no games from that era have survived to the current day.
The big difference between those runs and the current one is that people played those games. Most of the people buying current TCGs are looking at them at investments, rather than games. Wonders of the First, with its NFT versions of card is making the resalability of the cards a selling point. Unfortunately, the one time we ran a demo session of the game, no one showed up.
Buy TCGs if you want to play them, not as an investment vehicle.
Releasing Oct 17. If you want any pre-order with us by noon Sept 29th.
The Adeptus Custodes.
The apex of the Emperor’s genetic achievement.
His Aquilon Terminators, more akin to battleships than infantry, arrive brand new in plastic for the first time.
Also releasing are a number of Adeptus Custodes kits that were previously only available in Adeptus Custodes Support Battle Group.
Codex: Adeptus Custodes, hitting the shelves with new lore & rules. Available in a new battle focused format, fine tuned for battlefield action.
The new Adeptus Custodes Combat Patrol joins the ranks of our current range. Combat Patrols are customer favorites due to their thematic contents and added value. Be sure to ask us how to best stock these popular items
Peter
Levin, co-founder of Geffin Gaming Partners, according to the September 2026
issue of Fortune Magazine, has collected Pokemon, sports cards,
bobbleheads and comics since he was 4 years old (this year was his 31st
time at San Diego Comic Con) and has a deep love of them but also views them as
an investment vehicle, though like Scaramucci, he has no plans to liquidate his
collection anytime soon. Both men believe investing in these differ from
investments in things like cryptocurrency, NFTs and memecoins as, unlike those
items, cards and comics are tangible and the average person knows what a Pokemon
card or bobblehead is, a non-fungible token, not so much.
This
concerns me because most of the buyers of collectable card games today focus on
the collectable aspect and not the game aspect. We like to stream video related
to the products we sell and while we can comparatively easily find video of
people playing Magic the Gathering, Disney Lorcana and even Yu Gi Oh,
almost all the video that comes up for Pokemon shows people opening
packs and calculating the “actual” versus “expected” value of the box. Most of
our Pokemon sales go to people who have never played and never plan to play the
game and will only keep buying as long as they can find a customer. Eventually
the market will run out of people willing to buy. What happens then?
The valuation of high-grade and vintage Pokemon cards since 2004 has grown, according to CardLadder by over 3400%. Compare that to the Standard and Poor 500 stock market index, which has grown by a “mere” 483% over the same time period. The overall value of Pokemon cards has grown this year 28%, compared to “only” 13% by the S&P 500. AJ Scaramucci of Treasure Trove.com says he has already turned down an offer of over $3 million for the Tales of Suspense #39 and, though Treasure Trove has no plans to sell the comic or the Pikachu Illustrator card, he believes these sort of collectibles are vastly undervalued and expects the Pikachu Illustrator card due to the same type of rarity as that of artworks by masters from the 18th and 19th centuries to reach a valuation of $100 million sometime in the future.