Monday, July 26, 2010

Contest, Redux!

Well, the poster giveaway is over now, and served its intended purpose: the email newsletter had about a 50% increase in size (which sounds more impressive than "went from 20-couple to 30-couple"), so that's great. Congrats to @alithra for being selected as the winner of the Vengeful Archon poster.

I had so much giving away the poster (seriously - everything about it was cool, from seeing the email list grow, to hyping the contest on Twitter, to deciding how to randomly pick a winner, to tracking down a poster tube on Freecycle to mail the poster in) that I have decided to keep the giveaways coming!

I have had sitting around for a while now several oversized "box topper" cards from 8th Edition and 9th Edition. Recent questions on Twitter have shown me that not everyone knows what these box toppers are, so here's a brief explanation. For 8th Edition and 9th Edition, Wizards of the Coast added an oversized card to the top of each box of booster packs as an incentive for people to buy an entire booster box. [This was abandoned after 9th Edition; its most recent counterpart is the "buy-a-box" alternate-art foil promo cards WotC has been making for the last couple of sets].

Each box topper shows on one side a reprint of a card from the appropriate set (with a black border instead of white), with the flip side being a larger version of the art for the card (in landscape orientation). Below is a photo montage of the front of such a promo (with its smaller cousin beside it for comparison) and the back:


Currently I have 10 of these that have been sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do with them. I had always intended to eventually put them up for sale, but as I said - I enjoyed giving away the M11 prerelease poster, so why not continue the contest and give away the box toppers?

So, that is what I am going to do. Every couple of weeks (I'll announce specifics via Twitter - so follow me there if you want to keep up) I will give away another box topper promo until I run out of them. By popular demand (sort of - it got two votes where other cards only got one each), my Tweeps picked the 9th Edition Force of Nature to be the first one given away (which is why I chose it for the photo).

After that, who knows? I have an even bigger Thorn Elemental promo that I could give away, as well as many other nice goodies that I wouldn't necessarily be able to easily sell, but that someone would love to own nonetheless (altered art Daze, anyone?; or the strangely misprinted Words of Worship shown to the right?) - and maybe even some that I most definitely WOULD be able to sell, but am willing to give away anyway.

The 9th Edition Force of Nature box topper promo card will be given away on Thursday August 5, 2010 at 9 p.m. EDT. I picked Thursday this time instead of Friday as I know many of my followers are busy at FNM on Friday nights!

So, what do you need to do to win? It's easy - just sign up to be on my email newsletter list. Subscription is easy: at my store's home page there is a form wherein you enter your email address. You'll be sent a confirmation email, in which you click a link to confirm your subscription. And that's it! You'll be entered to win all future contests, as long as you remain on the list.

I'm still trying to decide what to do regarding past winners: is EVERYONE eligible to win, or only if you didn't win a previous contest, or only if you didn't win the LAST contest...I'll see what the poll results are (see the poll at the top of the page and VOTE, please!) before making a final decision on that one. I'll post that decision here when I make it.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Contest!

This past Saturday (July 10, 2010 for those reading this way after the fact), my older son and I had the pleasure of attending the prerelease for the newest set of Magic, the Magic 2011 Core Set (AKA M11).

At the particular site where we attended, the first X number of people to register received a free promotional poster featuring art from the M11 card Vengeful Archon [to see what this 24" x 36" poster looks like you can go here]. As my son and I were the first two in line (we arrived a bit more than an hour before the doors were scheduled to open), we each received a copy.

My son plans on keeping his, in the hopes that some day it is worth something as a collector's item. I, on the other hand, am giving mine away!

As I have mentioned on my Twitter account, next Friday (July 23, 2010) at 9 p.m. EDT, I will select one random subscriber to my store's email newsletter to receive this poster as a free gift. No purchase is necessary, no postage shall be charged - all one needs to do to be eligible is subscribe to the newsletter. So if you're already subscribed, you don't need to do anything at all!

Subscription is easy: at my store's home page there is a form wherein you enter your email address. You'll be sent a confirmation email, in which you click a link to confirm your subscription. And that's it! You'll be entered to win the poster.

So what happens to you if you subscribe? Will you be receiving hundreds of annoying emails? Not to worry - I don't send very often. When a new set is added to inventory (like the upcoming M11 addition) I send an announcement. And if anything else significant gets added to my store (like when my Revised Edition Toolkit was created), or if I have a special sale or event such as that, I send an announcement. So far in all of 2010 I have only sent out three emails (and a fourth will go out next week to announce M11). So you need not worry about me clogging up your email box!

As of this writing there are only 18 subscribers to my store's newsletter, so your odds are looking very good for winning if you sign up. And if you are already a subscriber and, for some reason, wish to NOT be considered for the drawing, please let me know. I will simply leave you out when I pick the winner.