I hope you had a safe and fun New Year’s. It has been snowing in Utah for over two weeks. Our snowpack levels are at mid-February levels and it doesn’t look like we are getting any relief anytime soon.
Like many of you, I’m watching for updates on NFL player Damar Hamlin and praying that he will be able to recover. What a devastating freak injury and my thoughts and prayers go out to him, his family, and the medical staff that is working with him.
2022 is now closed and I’m working on closing the books for the year. There are a few outstanding orders that should be going out today and we can finally put the year to rest. Thank you all for such a great year. We were honored to have worked with collectors/players/fans of various games and their hobbies in over 40 countries this past year. We’ve had over ten staff members work with us this year and four of those staff started in November when things really were picking up and they were having to learn various games on the fly. It always feels great getting a message saying that we helped someone finish a set, build a deck, etc. Thank you all!
Our YouTube videos going through every issue of Inquest will return shortly. They will still be every Tuesday and Friday once we start back up.
I’m curious about what 2023 will bring. The CCG/TCG industry is in an interesting spot with Magic having lost a lot of ground with their player/collector base, newer games like Flesh and Blood still trying to gain footing and traction, Anime based games based around properties like One Piece and the Weiss Schwarz group of games, and the upcoming Disney Lorcana game set to release this fall. This will be an interesting year in gaming, and it will be curious who will join the Out of Print gaming list in 2023.
Repricing
While taking some time away from our office over Christmas, I was looking at some of the category levels for Star Trek. Sets like Deep Space 9 were seeing a large influx of singles in stock with little sales while a set like Reflections had very little in stock, everything sold very quickly when we got new items in, and something needed to change. So this leads me to undertake a large pricing update across each game on the site. So far, pricing has been updated for the following games: 7th Sea, Age of Empires, Alien vs Predator, Ani-Mayhem, Arcadia, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Battletech, Blood Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Call of Cthulhu, City of Heroes, Conan, Doomtwon, Doomtrooper, Dune, GI Joe, Guardians, Harry Potter, Hercules, Illuminati, Legend of the Burning Sand, Middle Earth, Mythos, Netrunner and Star Trek 1E.
I plan on continuing going through and repricing the rest of the games on-site to fit current market pricing, current inventory levels, and where I see the popularity of some of these games going. A game like Legend of the Burning sand saw nearly a 50% drop in every card pricing whereas games like Mythos and Netrunner either slightly increased on some sets or stayed nearly the same.
The other aspect of this repricing is that we are redoing inventory on each game to make sure we are not having any phantom stock. I really hate disappointing customers and not having cards they were expecting in orders and sending refunds for them. So far we have re-inventories VS System and are currently working on Star Wars CCG.
At the end of 2019, we started to see an increase in out of print games and our sales of various games were really starting to increase. The start of 2020 continued that same path and then the pandemic started, people were at home, and the collectibles market exploded. We are seeing many games returning to their late 2019ish pricing and interest levels. Some games are continuing as if everyone was still working from home though and those will be harder to price. Mainly because we don’t know how soon it will return to normal levels, if it will or if it will continue to gain interest.
A game like Star Trek continues to see singles increase in value when boxes for those sets are no longer easily available. Higher-end AIs for Star Wars CCG are decreasing while cards like Enhanced Leia, non-AI Coruscant counterparts, and the UR Luke and Emp from DS 2 and Reflections 2 are both still seeing strong sales whenever they land in stock.
Look for items to continue to be restocked as we move from repricing and inventorying to adding new inventory. We currently have over 30 open buylists that we are waiting on and a large collection of VS System that should be arriving soon that we will start working on processing, sorting, and adding to the site.
If you have made it this far, thanks for reading. Next week’s email will have a different set of games. Stay safe and Stack the Deck with CategoryOneGames!
Helpful Links
Website: https://www.categoryonegames.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Category1Games
Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/1d5a7e33b820/categoryonegames
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/categoryonegames/?ref=hl
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CategoryOneGame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/categoryonegames/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@categoryonegames
Blog: https://blog.categoryonegames.com/
