Orc Flickin' in Blighty

On Episode 27 of the Rascal Radio Hour, Chase and Caelyn returned from Dragonmeet to discuss the games, memories, and various illnesses they collected over the weekend. Their inaugural attendance coincided with the UK's biggest RPG-focused convention moving into a bigger venue. But that relocation prompted a lot of chatter amongst the public and vendors regarding growing pains and a loss of identity.

Later, the pair discuss DriveThruRPG's heavily criticized Partner Shipping Program, which seems to offer too little for too much money. Two big evils within trading card games (licensed crossovers and speculative markets) get their own dedicated chats, and mixed in there is effusive conversation regarding how fun it is to flick orcs. Finally, the Question Dungeon summons the ghosts of conventions past and asks us to name a ton of cool worker-owned websites that deserve your time and patronage.

You can find Rascal Radio Hour on Apple, Spotify, and all the other various podcatchers. Leaving a five-star review helps new listeners find our show and website. Since we eschew traditional advertising, these reviews and any word-of-mouth are genuinely a massive help — thank you!

Here's an excerpt:

Chase: GameStop has been struggling for the past decade to stay alive as a company. They were the subject of meme stocks, but this feels like another version of GameStop not being able to exist as a traditional company, anymore. Instead they are latching on to very pernicious and exploitative programs, like these power packs, and just leeching as much money out of it as possible. These are the sort of stories that encourages people to sit down at a slot machine for 18 hours a day across an entire month, hoping to be the one who hits it big. Hopefully, listener, I don't have to be the one to tell you: the system is built on 99.9% of people losing so 0.1% can win and tell stories like this.

Behind all of that, GameStop is leeching away the holding fees and the the listing fees and the selling fees. Just shave money off the head of the evil that is institutionalized gambling. It just sucks from head to toe because this is how most trading card games function now: secondary markets, scalpers, people trying to make money off of a game. As someone who, deep in their heart and their bones, hates gambling, it's just hard not to feel like the evil is in the foundation of the house of trading card games. And I don't know what you do with that.

Caelyn: The day after Dragonmeet, I met up with a friend who lives close to London. We went to the Gundam-based pop-up store that's in Camden because I've never been there and they're someone that I met through the kit building community. We played the Gundam Card Game, which is a really good game; I like it a lot, actually. And it seems to be in that very similar situation. It's not been out long, it came out earlier this year. But my friend was showing me this bewildering array of promotional cards and alternate art cards and prize cards. I was just overwhelmed. This is a new game, and it's launched straight into that.

Chase: Yeah, if you want to survive as a product, you've got to have these chase cards and alternate arts. Trading card games can't just be a game that you play.

Caelyn: The funny thing is (going back to talking about the Secret Lair stuff) other than the limited quantities and scalpers, the Secret Lair model seems like the best of the bunch. Effectively alternate art cards for existing things. Cool, this is where they're gonna be on sale. Come and buy them. There's some super duper fancy ones, but you're paying like a set amount of money for a set amount of stuff. You know exactly what you're gonna get.

Chase: And that was how Secret Lair was sold originally: a premium product for people who want premium alternate art game pieces. We're not gonna be putting out unique designed cards that you can only get through here. We're not going to like put very valuable reprints only here, and that's the only way you can get these cards that are already really hard to get.

And it seemed like a good thing. Then over the course of several years, Wizards has walked back each of those promises. Unique designs are in there. Reprinting very powerful and very sought after cards only in Secret Layers. Setting up a system which rewards scalpers who buy them all up, crash the site, and someone goes, well, I wasn't there in the first 15 seconds . Guess I'll go to eBay and spend $1,500 to procure these cards.

The system, unfortunately, has just been slotted directly into the speculative market, and all the good intentions amounted to not much at all.

Caelyn: Just play Netrunner. That's the answer: just play Netrunner.