We hit the stores. Rosie was right. Merchandise randomly strewn into various booster boxes from various sets. Packs with cards that, at the time, when released, seemed to hold no potential for play, but were now classics, intermixed with garbage of the current era of gameplay. Sure, the batch had been picked from. But it hadn’t been picked clean.
After visiting the first shop, safely outside of range of the store owner’s ears, Rosie shot up, “I told ya! Goldmine!”
I was happy too. I hadn’t decided on what to get just yet, however I would certainly come back to this shop to compare wares with the others. Good choices.
“I saw some 7th Gen machines for my Mechanics deck that I grabbed. You don’t mind if I took them, right?”
“No problem.” I spouted, “I don’t think I was going that way with my deck design, anyway.”
Rosie was pleased that she could have the machines to herself. It would have been tough on our friendship if we had chosen the same deck style. I had seen friendships broken up over the ownership of a card, much less a set of them.
“Still going with a spread build?” She piped.
“I think so, yeah. I like the diversity and potential synergies with that build.”
“You already know what I think.” She was being helpful. “Focus on one play style. That’s what all the great players have done. Just look at the world championship builds. Very archetypical. Plants. Planes. Diggers.”
“No machines?” I was being coy. I knew what was next.
“And that’s why I! Rosie Angel! Will be the first female (or otherwise) Machinist player to top the Red Diamond rankings. I’m all set up to do so.”
Rosie was always passionate about machines. Her dad worked as a mechanical engineer and he did a lot of tinkering in his spare time. When we were young, people in our class knew her as the girl who always harbored a small spanner wrench with her in her pink overalls. She told me later that she had swiped it from her dad’s workbench one day when he wasn’t looking.
I remember that during recess, she’d only take it out and let us see it if we promised to not tell the teacher. I never told, although many of our other classmates did so in private. That’s probably why I’m still her friend to this day. As I remember, she was regularly in trouble for bringing it to school – it was not really a plaything that the teacher wanted in the class.
“How about Dinosaurs?” She remarked. “There were some in the piles I looked through.”
“You need an engine to play them”, I said, “The support is also lacking. One meteorite shower and they all go caput. There’s no coming back from that…”
We continued to walk through the stores and after a while I had decided on a couple of packs of the cards that would serve as the basis for my deck. I felt delirious as the cashiers rang up the absurdly low prices and I forked over the dough, but I was confident it was the right thing to do.
“Good haul, overall!” she said, “Those cards are worth at least 3 to 4 times what you paid for them. Good stuff to start out.”
I agreed. We took the bus to the big shopping mall and made a big event of opening each pack ceremoniously, driveling over the contents. It was mindboggling looking over cards that hadn’t seen the light of day for a decade or more. They smelled and looked pristine, which was always important in buying a sealed product like this. To keep them safe, Rosie had brought around some spare card sleeves she had been using for her secondary deck. They were certified Perm-a-seal, meaning that they wouldn’t come out of the sleeves except by using an off-the-shelf Desleever. That’s the best way to keep all your cards in perfect condition during gameplay and is the Production Studio’s official card sleeve of choice, so you know they’re good.
I chose the “Clearie” backs for the sleeves as I’m a traditionalist and I like to clearly see the logo on the backs of the cards. And what’s more appropriate than seeing the traditional artwork for your first deck? Plus, in this case it was doubly appropriate since all the backs prominently featured the namesake “Red Diamond”.
