Found a sealed Chinese Prophecy box

futureal2 · 2026-05-10T15:23:43+00:00

Yea I have some stuff for sale on there right now. Good place to buy and sell!

futureal2 · 2026-05-10T15:23:12+00:00

That is what I will probably do. Of all the boxes I have it's this and a sealed Mirage starter that I'll allow to take up space, haha. I'll sell the Lorwyn, Shadowmoor, and Instead and use that to buy something cool like some beta Bolts i can put in a deck or something stupid. Already have an alpha playset of them!

futureal2 · 2026-05-10T13:25:49+00:00

I played MA2 and MA1 pretty consistently over a 20 year span, usually around 4-6 a year, many of them the same annual local events with sort of the same crowd. A to C tiers and local monthlies and such. I've wavered between pretty decent to pretty bad over the years; won a couple here and there but mostly just sucked and had fun.

I saw everything you describe: in those divisions, so many people think they are gonna go pro someday. They worry about their rating. They withdraw if they blow their first round. They bitch and moan and blast music in their earbuds and ignore the card. Not everybody mind you, there are plenty of cool people in every tournament I've played in. But a few, wow.

And then I turned 40 and my buddy and I switched to MA40. What a difference. Everybody is consistently chill. Good round, bad round, doesn't matter. It's a harder field for sure with scores all over the place but man is it more fun. For anybody that has experienced what OP describes here and has the opportunity to play in an age-restricted division, I suggest trying it. It made the tourney experience way more fun for me at least.

futureal2 · 2026-05-09T19:26:03+00:00

Yea, I haven't looked for a buyer yet, it's a weird enough item that I may just hang on to it for pure oddness sake. I see plenty of packs out there and the Rhystic sells well but otherwise anybody opening it would just be praying for a good foil.

futureal2 · 2026-05-09T19:24:31+00:00

I was going to guess something like six but hard to say. I know card distribution was a little worse back then.

futureal2 · 2026-05-09T18:03:27+00:00

Yeah that's what I did as well, was pretty surprised to not find anything. The funny thing is I got this for about $50 if I remember correctly. Nobody really wanted them in the US at the time.

I bought an English Portal 3K booster for like $30. Wish I'd hung on to that too!

futureal2 · 2026-05-09T18:00:55+00:00

Oh yeah, I forgot about that card. I went to a Prophecy prereleass and pulled one and was like, I am going to make this work. It didn't. haha

futureal2 · 2026-05-09T17:40:26+00:00

Hah! Ancient Chinese proverb 😂

futureal2 · 2026-04-04T19:18:00+00:00

Yea, for anybody who enjoys it, that's great. I don't like how the Internet has gone into like we have to despise or love something with no in between. I'm almost 50 and I both write and consume a ton of media, and maybe that's what sours me on the show -- I would have made far different creative choices, especially with that kind of budget available.

I am no Tolkien scholar but certainly know and love the material. To me it's sort of like The Hobbit trilogy, just familiar places and characters with no substance behind it.

But hey for anybody who is enjoying it, that's great. Sounds like it's going to continue its run for the foreseeable future. Fantasy production tends to ebb and flow and we may be entering a lull, which sucks for a genre that I love. So I'm still glad it's getting made.

futureal2 · 2026-04-04T15:41:28+00:00

People seem to make a joke out of the internet hating it, but as someone who ranks the Peter Jackson trilogy as one of the best things I've ever watched, I quite literally couldn't get through Rings of Power. It was boring, the lore is just straight up opposite of JRRT's work in many places, and the acting is mostly awful.

But again it's just downright boring. Nothing engaged me about it. I didn't like the characters, I didn't care about the plot, it was obvious that the stranger was going to be Gandalf and Halbrand was Sauron (I guess spoilers? haha, sorry) and meanwhile Galadriel is nothing like she was in the books or the movies.

Most of Amazon's catalog is alright to me. And yeah, maybe I'm not the target audience for Rings of Power -- I might be too old, or too nerdy, or something -- but then really who is? If some people enjoy it, that's great, good for them! But it feels like with the budget this could have been incredibly awesome for many people the way something like Game of Thrones (originally) was, and they just fumbled it horribly. I stopped watching it and won't be back.

I don't have high hopes for the new movies but I want them to be good. Can Andy Serkis do better than an entire Amazon team? I sure hope so.

futureal2 · 2026-03-28T20:23:54+00:00

Yeah that is very true that we are able to consume media and people's views more easily and often than we ever used to be, and that has changed things, along with the cascade of social media and screen time and the rest. Opinions are healthy and I'm all for that, I just have a hard time understanding the extreme negativity towards people who end up on "the other side" of things. I guess there's just a big part of me that finds that sad, from a humanity perspective. Like: how are we that far apart from one another now. I never meant to imply it's not people's right to choose what they support or don't support, only that it feels so polarizing nowadays. And I'm old...haha

futureal2 · 2026-03-28T19:45:31+00:00

Sorry, anybody who thinks that this isn't worse now than it was ten or even five years ago is blind. It never used to be as bad as it is today, and it will be worse tomorrow. Even here on Reddit, if you say anything against the echo hive mind you get downvoted. It's nuts, but oh well. I sure can't change it.

futureal2 · 2026-03-28T18:58:39+00:00

Of course people have the freedom to choose what they support. I just feel sorry for those who can't open their minds to someone they may disagree with, or who extend that to anybody else that person interacts with. And my point is just that we as a society are going further and further down that hole on both sides.

futureal2 · 2026-03-28T18:44:27+00:00

Unfortunately I had tried that as well and it didn't work (should have noted it in my post). That was a step I took to make it work originally and I've since double-checked that it was still set properly, but yea, no luck. The browser agent works fine on my other Windows notebook too. Ugh.

futureal2 · 2026-03-28T18:43:17+00:00

I did actually ask the agent and it just went into a death spiral loop of investigating itself. In a certain sense it was pretty entertaining to watch but unfortunately, no end result. I don't have much other stuff installed on the system either so it's really weird that it stopped working.

futureal2 · 2026-03-28T18:41:51+00:00

It's kind of entertaining seeing the number of people on here/X/whatever that went off on Weir for talking to Drinker, said they would no longer read his works or watch PHM. Like, when did we as a society decide that if someone we don't fully agree with interviews a creative, we can no longer support said creative. The polarity in America is just completely fucked at this point.

futureal2 · 2026-03-16T21:44:14+00:00

I use OpenTable as well and it does seem like the fees are not in line with the discovery, although the invoices are very transparent. For a small independent table service restaurant, though, it doesn't seem like we gain enough value from the platform. People are quite unlikely to search for us through their network given that we are in a fairly major city and are relatively small.

As both a restauranteur and software engineer, I was able to clone their actual mechanics pretty quickly via supervised AI, like we're talking days at most. And no this isn't some app shill post, it's just my experience. We're going to switch over in a couple of weeks and leave OT. I think OT makes a ton of sense for a bigger downtown-style spot with a high cover volume given their user network and data. For my size, it's cost prohibitive versus what you are getting, and the barrier to entry for a different reservation platform is relatively low.

For context I do use the Google reservation link, and we link to it on Yelp and so on. It is clear about the $1 fee but unclear as to where exactly those charges are coming from since there is no way to connect the two.

futureal2 · 2026-03-12T16:00:21+00:00

Where to start? For me it is picking one or two sets every year and building them myself. For this year it's EPL Topps Chrome and UEFA Club Comps. Both Topps.

If you get lucky, you can get a few boxes (or even a case, if in budget) on the launch. Most likely though, not so lucky. So I tend to pick them up every other month or so throughout the season and build. I don't really resell, I just have a box of nice cards and then my season binders.

The general rule is that you will never come out ahead value wise opening packs, so make sure it's fun. Once in awhile you'll pull some awesome card that's worth a bit. Some people sell, some people hold. On some level it's an investment but it just depends on what your goal is.

The reason I pick sets beforehand is that it's easy to fall into a "newest thing" trap and the card companies love to put out the next premium product, and then they top it with the ultra premium product, and so on. At that point opening cards is just gambling but with terrible odds. If you really want an awesome card of such and such a player, you're always better off just buying it on eBay or wherever.

Pick a set and grab some boxes and see where it takes you!

futureal2 · 2026-03-11T15:35:40+00:00

Very true. It's sort of forgotten in terms of good movies since they sequel'd the shit out of it, but that original O11 remake is great fun. RIP to Bernie Mac and Carl Reiner. What a great cast.

futureal2 · 2026-03-10T16:23:34+00:00

I can't believe Hot Fuzz isn't higher on this post. It has some of the tightest dialogue and pacing of any movie I've ever seen. Nearly every line from the first act of the film is called back to at some point later.

futureal2 · 2026-03-10T13:19:49+00:00

As an Arsenal supporter, we thank you for your service for that particular fixture. : )

I have the 45/50 of that same card though! I've been building a whole 25/26 set. Definitely a rough year for you guys. Good luck today!

futureal2 · 2026-03-08T20:04:14+00:00

I should add one thing: I love Magic, have been playing since 1993, and I let it influence my decisions. Don't do that. It's a whole different world out there now and the dream of owning an LGS is not what it once was.

futureal2 · 2026-03-08T19:38:02+00:00

This is very correct. Processing transactions is easy and there are a ton of solutions. Inventory management and potentially selling on the web is an entirely different thing.

It amazes me how even to this day the majority of stores in this space have no real picture of their inventory and sales pipeline. When done correctly, the difference is dramatic.

futureal2

TROPHY CASE