By Adrian | October 18, 2018
Many moons ago when I was back in high school a few of my school mates introduced me into the world of collectable card games, and in particular the Decipher Star Wars CCG, this was an instant hit with me. I mean what’s not to love about card games and Star Wars? The game had an easy mechanic that didn’t involve anything more than just the cards and the games were relatively quick.
I used to carry that binder and deck box in my backpack ready to play at an instances notice at lunch time, after school etc.
I have many a memory of going to the local card stores and getting myself a booster pack for a few dollars with the very limited money I had. I have no idea how much I ended up spending on cards trying to finish out a set, but the memories were good.
After high school had finished, life moved on and regrettably I never really kept in touch with friends from school. It was an era of my life I was happy to leave behind moving into the real world.
Times moved on quickly with work commitments, leaving home for the first time, having a long distance relationship, getting married, work, study, work, some more work, having kids and now many years later my own kids are starting to grow up. How time flies.
A few years back my eldest son come home from school with a fistful of Pokemon cards. This was a game I had seen but never got into myself. Further inspection revealed that these were fake cards. nooooo. Not even good quality ones. Cant have worthless cards. If my kids ever decided they wanted to go into competitive play they would be kicked out. So I saw this as an opportunity to teach my kids about looking after things and collecting where we could all learn along the way.
So it was off to the local card store for $6 booster packs. It started off small. $20 here and there, picking up sleeves, binders, 9 pocket pages and set starter decks. But then I remembered something. You can buy boxes of these things for a discount. It works out much cheaper than buying 36 individual packs (at <$4), and here’s the best part, they make awesome bribes rewards when you need something done or want to reinforce good behaviour.
In my day, I wouldn’t have been able to afford $100+ for an entire booster box, but these days this is entirely possible, its cheaper on the wallet, the kids get to experience the fun of opening booster packs and pulling out those shiny cards. To top it off the first of any new card goes into the binder, and I get to relive my childhood memories again. I’m sure my wife thinks that that its more for me than the kids, she might be right. Stay tuned for what I’ve done next…