Alara Reborn is here!

I have just finished getting all of the Alara Reborn singles up on Don's Magic and Sundry. Over at eBay I have booster packs, complete Common sets and complete Uncommon sets available. After opening 5 boxes' worth of booster packs, I obtained at least one copy of every card in the set except for 1 Mythic Rare card (Uril, the Miststalker), although I did get a copy of that card in Foil.

Alara Reborn is a rather different expansion. It's the first set ever that's "all gold" - that is, every single card is multicolored. In the past multicolored cards (first introduced in the Legends expansion way back when) have been a part of most sets, but usually only a small percentage of the cards. That means this set has no Land cards at all (Land cards, to date, are all colorless) which is rather rare these days.

My favorite card in the set is hard to pin down. I think it is most likely this lady:


This probably has something to do with my aforementioned fondness for the Serra Angel, since Jenara is an Angel herself, but she's also a kick-butt creature in her own right, and also one of the most popular cards in the set. The fact that you can, any time you have a leftover 1W in mana lying around, put a +1/+1 counter on her, so she grows over time....nasty! And, as you can tell from the red expansion symbol, the card is a Mythic Rare, so it's going to be much harder to get your hands on than most other cards in the set. As of this writing I have three copies available.

Another popular card in the set is the Meddling Mage.


This is actually a reprint of a card first introduced in the Planeshift expansion. I noticed last weekend (the weekend of the Pre-release, when the complete spoiler list for the set was let out) that I was getting more "hits" on the store's website from people searching for "Meddling Mage", and then someone finally bought the two copies of the card (in Japanese) that I had available. Then I looked at the spoiler list and found out why! Now that the card has been reprinted, it is once again "tourney legal", and those older cards (which were always pretty popular anyway) are now viable in a lot more decks, so they should show a marked rise in popularity. Too bad I have none of the older ones left - but (right now) I do have 4 copies of this new one available.

In other news, I continue to hack away at the large collections (including one of over 100,000 cards) that I have recently obtained, getting rares & foils listed in the store, and preparing to make a large number of complete Common & complete Uncommon sets for many different expansions. I should be busy for months getting these cards processed!

I have abandoned by Google Adwords experiment. While it was undeniably increasing traffic to the store (I had a few days where the total number of page loads went over 1,000), practically none of this traffic led to any sales (I think only 1 or 2, maybe). I just can't justify paying $0.20 or more per click when these clicks aren't generating any money. I'll just have to rely on word-of-mouth and regular Google searches to bring people to the store.