*** first TCG card show. also seeing HEALTH again!
it was a lot of fun but definitely pretty overwhelming. finding the venue proved to be more difficult than i anticipated but we finally arrived and still with a lot of time to spare. i did good at sticking to my budget because i told myself i would only stick with the cash i had brought instead of using venmo, which worked out doubly in my favor because my service in the venue was nonexistent.
a lot of people say this about card shows but i was kind of surprised at the varying prices! more often than not i would walk from one booth to another and see a card that might have been really expensive at the booth i was just at being sold for quite cheap. i didn't really have much luck making dents in my collection because of this, at least in terms of the cards i was prioritizing at the event (light dragonair, light azumarill, light togetic, and the old yuka morii blissey card) because the prices were so variable. due to these cards all being vintage, when i did see one of those cards, it was usually more expensive than i see that card going for on ebay. it wasn't like modern FIR cards which tend to sell more frequently and have a more consistent average of pricing on sites like TCGplayer. interesting experience all around because of that; and worth noting that for any vintage cards, you will probably be better off mostly buying from ebay unless it's a vintage 'bulk' card.
that said, almost everything i ended up buying was a vintage card! here are my card pickups:
i also got a few things for my partner (giovanni's charisma full art with him petting his persian & blaine's rapidash since they love horse pokemon) but they already put those in their binder so i don't have pics of those to share.
oddly enough i only ended up seeing one N-specific card (not N's zekrom or N's reshiram) and that was the secret art for N's resolve. i wish that card were cheaper...
the venue was busy even though it was sunday so we didn't have many opportunities to chat with anyone, but it was pretty overwhelming so that ended up being ok.
in other news, i saw HEALTH again on their carpenter brut & desire tour and they were once again amazing. i don't really listen to desire apart from the song they wrote for drive 2011 but this is something i will have to fix because their energy was incredible. carpenter brut was a lot of fun too; i listened to them a lot primarily in late 2019 and all through lockdown in 2020 and kind of got burnt out on their music after that so it was fun to get re-exposed to all the songs i used to love after taking a long break from listening to them. lots of crowdsurfing, which was cool, but also kind of stressful since we were pretty close to the barricade and i did get a shoulder to the space right under the eye at some point. i got tickets to the afterparty in my state as well and ended up right next to the DJ booth next to megan of desire and later johnny himself, which was cool. i didn't talk to either one of them but johnny did attempt to dab me up which i flubbed because i thought he was just trying to high five me... sorry johnny. also, for those curious, his iphone lock screen is his cat.
my boyfriend got hit in the head by a guitar pick being thrown from the stage as we were leaving so that was cool too. thank you HEALTH. please cover a song from dmc.
seeing HEALTH reminded me i still have to play the recent ULTRAKILL layer which i did which in turn reminded me how terrible i am at ULTRAKILL but man is it a lot of fun. can't believe the game has only one more layer to go now.