Sooo Busy...

Yeah, that's my excuse for not blogging much lately. Of course, it's not entirely true, but I'm not about to explain the details here. It just seems that everytime I want to blog, something else comes up. :P

Anyways, today I had to drive Alex Chen to church, 'cause he had no ride. But that's okay, 'cause I got to eat with him and Jon's family afterwards at 99. (The vietnamese noodles place.) During the time before our food came, we decided to go over to Toy's R Us to look at stuff. I haven't been in a store like that for a really really long time lol. Neither had Alex. He commented on how much it reminded him of his job at Wal-Mart, 'cause of the shelves and everything, and how he could take apart most of the store if he wanted to. I guess his job wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't all night shift. =/

Eventually, we found ourselves in the card games section, and we saw a lot of display boosters of Yu-gi-oh cards. They still had packs from almost every set, and unlike most kinds of cards, each pack was separated wrapped up in containers similar to the ones that they use to hold action figures and etc. I thought that was kinda weird; why wrap something up in another container when it's wrapped up already? It just makes more garbage for ppl to dispose of. And more of hassle getting to the cards in the pack. Jon said that it might be to prevent ppl from cheating and bending the packs to see if there's a holo card inside, but that's a pretty lame way to do it if you ask me. Magic packs don't feel any different if they have foils in them.

Another bad thing about Yu-gi-oh is their pricing. Most of the packs there were selling for $5.99. That's like 6 bucks, for a total of 9 cards. In those 9 cards are 8 commons and 1 'rare' card. Now, these aren't rare cards like in the Magic sense, where they're usually good, but rare as in "harder to find then common." If you're lucky, one of the cards in your pack might be randomly replaced with a super rare card (1 in every 6 packs) or an ultra rare card (1 in every 12 packs) And besides that, if you're the luckiest guy on earth, you might get to pull a secret rare (1 per box) So basically, if you're buying a pack of Yu-gi-oh, you're not even guaranteed to get something remotely playable, and you're spending a lot of money to boot. Compare this to Magic, where even nowadays, $4.50 can get you a pack of 11 commons, 3 uncommons, and 1 rare (the rarest rarity in Magic). And, unlike rares in Yu-gi-oh, a lot of Magic's rares are actually playable in some form. (barring things like Mudhole)

In a second glance, however,I noticed that the packs of a couple sets, notably Pharaonic Guardian, (Pharaonic...is that even a real word? =/) were selling for only about $2.00. Jon explained that that was because most of the cards in Pharaonic were crap, and it only had about 5 good cards that would be worth getting in a pack, one being a secret rare. Jon was tempted to get a booster of Invasion of Chaos, but balked at the price. He managed to inspire me, however, to try my luck with PG packs. I thought, "it's only $2 each, it can't hurt that much to just buy a couple of packs this once." Jon does his bending trick and uses his skills to try and pick good packs for me, so eventually we decided on two of them. So after some money swapping between me and him and Alex, I got my two packs. Jon tried to get the cashier to let him buy a pack for me for only a twoonie cause he "only had two bucks," but that plan omnifailed for kinda obvious reasons heh.

So after eating, we go outside to open them, and discover that Jon's lost his touch lol. I got GARBAGE in those two packs (Pharaoh's Treasure and Wandering Mummy were my rares, in case anyone cares)...I don't think the total value of each of them were worth even more than $1.00 *sigh* stupid Yu-gi-oh...I pity the ppl that play that game kinda...it's such a rip off. I know I've ranted a bit about that already, and my opinion has grown even stronger now. The game is worse than Magic, yet it costs more to play and the odds of getting good packs are even less. Wow, talk about dumb. The ppl at Upper Deck just have to do a quick rushed translation of the Jap cards, and then they can print a new set and steal even more money from little kids. They shouldn't even be in the TCG market...good thing Yu-gi-oh will never surpass Magic, which is an original and more advanced game.(IMHO, haha)

We hung around outside the restaurant until our parents were done, and talked about school - marks needed to get into comp eng at UW, and more bashing of Yu-gi-oh. =)
A while into our discussion, Brian Chau, one of my good friends whom I haven't seen in ages, came out of the restaurant. Thus, I ended up talking to him a lot...and found out that he now works part at Top Child. So he went from student to teacher, lol. Maybe I could get a joh there soon...heh, dang those other ppl.

So now, after spending a total of $4 (well, technically $20, if you count the Suijin that I bought for Trevor as a present) on Yu-gi-oh, I'm the proud owner of a Yugi starter deck (I think), a pack of Metal Raiders, a pack of Magic Ruler, and two packs of Pharaonic Guardian. The more I buy of this game, the more I hope that it will eventually die off. But at least now I have enough cards to be able to teach ppl the game...(David) hehe. If only it was free...