Star Wars CCG Insider Stories with Jim Colson (transcript)
Star Wars CCG INSIDER Stories, History & Collector Tips from the legend Jim Colson (24 April 2022) is a 79-minute BoardMatt interview with Jim Colson (Gold 5), a Decipher-era volunteer tournament director and later Players Committee advocate. Topics include his tournament circuit in Alabama and Tennessee, shields, Premiere Blue and Cartamundi printing, the delay of Alternate Universe in customs, Decipher's plans for relic cards and graded cards before the license ended, two-player sets, DecipherCon tournament foils, Reflections Gold, and the Krayt Dragon. Participants: Matt (BoardMatt, host), Cam, Mark (Darth Grader), Jim Colson.
Source: Star Wars CCG INSIDER Stories, History & Collector Tips from the legend Jim Colson, BoardMatt, YouTube (uploaded 24 April 2022).
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Speakers are identified from context; some questions are labelled Interviewer where the speaker is unclear. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript[edit]
[00:02] Matt: Welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. I'm joined by a couple new faces and one familiar face. So, today I have with me Darth Grader, aka Mark. And also Cam, who is the co-founder of RotoGrinders and a big Star Wars CCG graded fan and just overall great dude. And as well as Gold Five, also known as Jim Colson. And today we're going to be chatting with Jim about his experience as a part of the volunteer team with Decipher back from '95 to 2001. And sort of the his experience with that as well as a player and collector. So, I'm going to hand it over to Cam, actually, to give kind of a longer introduction of Jim and kind of start the conversation.
[00:53] Cam: Yes, Jim Colson, the man, the myth, the legend. This interview has been in the works for quite some time. I think I initially reached out almost 6 months ago. Sorry it took so long. We everyone who's on the Star Wars forums, Facebook groups, Discord knows who Jim Colson is. As mentioned, Gold Five from back in the day. We really have wanted to get an interview with Jim. You know, honestly, cuz whenever there's a question that pops up in the groups that someone doesn't know the answer to, you usually see the @JimColson tag him, wait a day or two, and then we get the actual answer from Jim himself. And he's always been nice enough to hop in there and answer those questions. And I view him at this point as like a preserver of the legacy and the history, one of the greatest minds in the game that's been there from the start through the finish. And obviously, YouTube wasn't a big thing when Star Wars existed. So, we will kind of wanted to get on a call with the legend himself and tell some of these stories, preserve some of the history of the great game that is Star Wars CCG because we are seeing new and returning players come as both collectors, as players, and the through the players committee's awesome efforts.
[02:11] Cam: So, we just think this would be a an amazing interview 101 for the history of Star Wars from both the collecting, playing, and community standpoint. So, I'll hand it over to you, Jim. Tell us a little bit about your background as a person, your involvement with Star Wars CCG, Decipher, Lord of the Rings, any other games of note, and where you're at with Star Wars CCG these days.
[02:37] Jim Colson: All right. Thanks, Cam. So, personally, professionally, I'm a federal employee. Been there for almost 35 years now. And so, for my entire involvement in Star Wars card game, I've been a federal employed civilian. I first started out with Department of Army, and I currently work for the Department of Defense right now. Formerly employed at organization under Secretary of Defense for at Defense Acquisition University, where we I am a learning director on site. I make sure that the things that are being taught to all the acquisition professionals in the military are to help them properly acquire systems, and the content of the course where is up to date and correct. So, that's what I do for my day job. Keeps me pretty busy. A good portion of that time I spend reviewing military systems. Like, I've been on the production line multiple times of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. I've been out on the flight deck of the Gerald R. Ford, our newest super carrier.
[03:52] Jim Colson: And if you Google either one of those two systems, I'm sure you can find out a lot of the problems they're having. And the and so we get called in to tell them what they did wrong and how to fix it. So, it's that's what I am what I do professionally. Where I started with Star Wars CCG, I got I have to give you a little bit of backstory here. So, that and that is it goes way back to Dungeons and Dragons when I was a kid. So, I played Dungeons and Dragons and there was a time when people thought that people who played Dungeons and Dragons were a bunch of magic worshipers or devil worshipers, right? And I had some friends that started playing Magic in '93 and they said, "Oh, you need to play this Magic game with us." And and so I said, "No. I've already been accused of being a devil worshiper once. I don't want to do it again." And so, they were convinced they were convinced to get me into some sort of card game. So, in '94, there was this new sci-fi based card game that came out called Star Trek Customizable Card Game. It's upon Next Generation. And sure enough, I bit.
[05:07] Jim Colson: And I got in at the end of '94 and the black border was hard to find. I was paying $6 a pack for it back then and buying it like crazy. Found the white border, bought a bunch of white border and the rest is history. It's Then this company announced a new brand new exciting license that they had, Star Wars. And well, I was already up to my armpits in the Star Trek card game. Star Wars was just My initial pre-order was six cases of premiere. And I didn't quite get all of it. The guy I bought it from realized it was so hot a property that he kept some of my pre-order and sold it to other people at twice the price. But I still ended up getting a good chunk of my pre-order and was able to continue to buy it and I started trying to run events, you know, cuz I had these fun great cards and I just really was trying to run events. So, my very first tournament I held in Huntsville. Two college kids drove up from Tuscaloosa, which is about an hour and a half two hour about a two hour drive to Huntsville. And they were the only two people for my first tournament.
[06:23] Jim Colson: And so, I realized that this is a this is a long haul opportunity. So, I just continued to start and schedule and hold events. And then pretty quick, people started showing up. They started driving down from Nashville, they started driving up from Birmingham, and then they said, "Well, well, we have a store in Nashville that you can run." So, I don't know if you've heard of people like Steven Lewis and Jonny Chu and guys like that. You know, so I was running the very first tournament that Steven Lewis ever played in and etc. Etc. So, I would drive once a month, I'd drive up to Nashville, I'd drive down to Birmingham, and I'd drive to Huntsville. And then the fourth weekend if I was available, I'd squeeze an extra tournament in one of those three locations. So, it was a lot of fun. We did a I ran a mountain of tournaments. I think Kyle Heuer told me that I was the single most number of tournaments run by any volunteer in the world. He had ran quite a bit himself, but I eventually passed him on the total tournament count. Now, I had some help, too, because I used to run bunch of convention tournaments.
[07:40] Jim Colson: And so, you know, when I when you go to a convention you schedule 10 tournaments, right? Sealed deck tournaments or you know, constructed event plays and stuff like that. So, I'd have a weekend two or three days a weekend where I'd run 10 events or so. So, that was that helped bump my count a little bit, too. So, all of that all those events accumulated to me doing events at small and large conventions, you know, I helped run events at Gen Con at course at DecipherCon and down to little cons like Deep South Con, Mid-South Con, Moby Con. Who's ever heard of Moby Con, right? That's a convention down in Mobile, Alabama. And so, I got tapped to run a lots of tournaments and events around the world. So, that's my experience as far as of the card game and being and doing stuff. And and the last kind of, you know, where does it fit today? So, one of the one of the big conventions that I used to run a lot of events at was Dragon Con. And I still I'm the card games director. I'm a director for the convention.
[08:57] Jim Colson: And so, I still try and make sure that every year in the card games department, we have Star Wars events. And I usually find one or two guys. They almost always will run a cube event. In past, we've had some sealed product to do sealed events. That's getting kind of tricky to do nowadays. Just because of the expense and it's scarce. And so, I continue to stay involved in the tournament community that way. I haven't run a tournament myself in a long time. That was part of the deal with becoming a director at Dragon Con. They told me, "You can coordinate and help and do whatever you want, but you can't run events." So, cuz other cuz I'm over magic and everything at that Dragon Con. So, I make sure I don't show favoritism, but you know, that's that's the way that goes at that So, that's where my continued involvement I continue to try and collect things as I can. I found I'm a little bit more sharing my extras than I am obtaining new novelties. But, I there's occasionally a few new things that come across, you know, like I never really collected the Japanese the Takara stickered seal product. So, I've started to pick a few of those things up here and there.
[10:14] Jim Colson: I think Julian's got one for me and Andy's got a couple for me. So, we're working a deal to get me some of those Takara stickered Star English Star Wars stuff. So, I'm I'm still adding stuff to my collection.
[10:26] Matt: And that's actually one thing that we're excited to see. I think we're going to try to do a little bit of a show and tell later on and show off some of the cooler things in your collection. Jim, that was a really great intro and sort of framing of the discussion. And so, I'm going to jump in with just a quick question. So, you know, the game ran from 1995 through 2001. And you know, it seems like you were pretty active within that. And I'm curious to see your you know, your depiction of what did what thing what things look like in '95, '96, '97 versus 2001, right? And and there was you know, it's relatively short amount of time, but there's so much you know, content that came out of it, a good number of sets, you know, mechanics that were first of a kind. So, I guess I'm kind of curious to see, you know, how that evolved from '95 to 2001 at the game's end.
[11:25] Jim Colson: So, you know, it's that's a you know, there's a lot of different things that kind of occurred during that time frame, you know. You know, like the you know, the whole decisions to you know, whether to have limited or unlimited and revised and all those types of how do we continue to grow the game without making cards go away, meaning like Magic has their standard cycles, seventh edition, 10th edition, 50th edition, you know, how they basically dump an entire couple years worth of cards and say they're no longer valid for tournament play. Nobody wanted that to happen to Star Wars. So how do you do that? Well, you know, they dis- they successfully did that sort of with Star Trek when they came out with second edition. But they still lost a whole bunch of players and stuff in Star Trek when they moved from first edition to second edition. So Decipher was really trying to figure out how to manage that transition in Star Wars if it could even be done. And so you know, one of the things they could do was start banning cards. One of the things they could do was issue, you know, a mountain of errata.
[12:42] Jim Colson: And that you know, they you know, they tried to errata a little bit. Like well, the first errata what was the very first errata they formally issued? It wasn't even over game text. It was a picture. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And and then shortly after that came Asteroid Sanctuary and Dagobah. And so right now and what did they do with that? Did they actually physically replace those cards? And so what kind of revenue did they get off those replacement cards? Nada. Zero. Nilch, right? There you go. There you go. Not a handy though. Yeah.
[13:19] Matt: That's the one that like, you know, it's a pain in the butt I imagine to mail those out to folks. Like errata pre you know, internet I think was a real, you know, pain to distribute and produce and especially if it was like a card correction. So, Yeah, I don't know what the original one looked like. I can't remember. What
[13:38] Jim Colson: Yeah, well, looking at that economic model is like, yeah, we just can't continue to do this. And then if you extend that those two experiences into issuing massive errata and it's just like, you know, we you know, we don't want They didn't have the stomach to do that. And so, and so, that's where they came up with Well, the other thing was, you know, the old Mother May I cards, right? You know what those are, right? That's what we used to call them. Mother May I? Mother May I play this interrupt? No, you may not. Alter, sense, control, right? Right? So, you know, the all you know, you know, the Mother May I cards were kind of over abused and you know, so there was So, Decipher started playing these bringing these counter cards into play that would start you know, that affected alter, sense, and control and other cards. And then pretty quick, you know, you got a deck limit, right? 60 cards. How can I How can I counter every really nasty MPE if you know, type deck and still have a deck that's fun to play with my fun card in it? And and so, they had to come up with a mechanic that allowed you to go fish out based upon what your guy the your opponent was trying to strategize against you the card to defend against it.
[15:03] Jim Colson: At least allow you to kind of play your deck. So, that's where the side deck concept came in with shields. And so, that's how we got the shields was errata. You know, it was errata or not. And so, that's that was That's the bottom line. That's how that evolved and So, I think it was pretty good. I think it was a pretty in between solution. And I think fundamentally there are some other things that truly needed to try and do to either get to a second edition or something, but that became moot.
[15:34] Matt: Yeah, shields I think you know, right now as a returning player right after 20 years and I kind of left the game right as shields were introduced. They felt like a barrier to entry, right? Because it's like already a complex game and then you add on this extra Well, then you have your side deck that has, you know, 15 or 20 cards and so I think shields are actually an elegant solution now that I understand them, but I do think for sort of that new or returning players they are daunting. To know that you have 60 cards and you have another pile that's underneath this objective. They're starting to affect.
[16:07] Jim Colson: Which is the So, let me tell you a story about shields, right? About negative player experience, right? Why shields were so important to the game. Is that because I had a store owner who would spend, you know, good amount of money on Star Wars. Of course, I helped him with that a lot. But he come up to me and said, "Jim, you know everybody's playing this game. I want to learn how to play it." I said, "Okay, so let me sit down." And I was going to get this little demo deck out. He said, "No, no, no, no, no. I just want to play the game. Throw your best deck at me." I said, "Ed, you really don't want to do that." I said He said, "No, I don't care. What you got? Throw it at me. I just I want to" I'm like going, "Ed, you really don't want to do that." And so he's convinced me that what? You don't think I don't know how to play the game? You don't think I'm a very good player? Okay. So, I threw an Asteroid Sanctuary deck He said, "I'm never going to play this game again."
[16:57] Matt: Yeah, it's just like not a fun interactive I mean, that's the thing about the Star Wars CCG meta of like, you know, the '90s. A lot of the best decks were not interactive or they're they're kind of like Sense and Alter. I've been playing in this premier Hoth league and Sense and Alter is like the worst thing just to play against, especially when you have like a modern lens of what a CCG can be as far as tutors and you know cards that pull other things and kind of removing some of the RNG or the randomness of gaming. But I think I'm going to pause there. I'm going to hand it over to Mark. I know Mark had a couple of questions and I've been chatting a lot so I'm going to I'm going to hand the mic over.
[17:40] Mark: Sure, yeah. Thanks Matt and Jim. Yeah, I had some questions kind of from the collecting front. Certainly you got a lot of things there and maybe we can have some inquiries into the vast mountain of treasures that exist. And I think we have a similar question occurring on multiple fronts, but maybe what are some of the highlights of your collection? Maybe you can just throw out a couple stats that might you know impress upon people the bounties that lie within your treasure trove.
[18:12] Jim Colson: Right. So with collecting cards there's different classes or categories of collecting, right? So you can just say I just collect the cards, right? So I pretty much you know a complete collection of the cards. But then there's a subcategories of collection, you know, like the stuff that goes with the cards where you know like boxes and wrappers and etc. Etc. So you can really extend that out to sealed product and everything else. So and that's where you find a large part of collectors are in that domain space. The cards and maybe some sealed product. And then you get into the really rich and deep artifacts of the game and thing and those are artifacts that come from the days of when the it was out there and things were going and people having fun. And and some of that may include some of the promotional cards like the oversized cards and things like that. But I think maybe some of the things that you don't see very often are things that you know that you know we're just kind of used to like we have our experiences and at the conventions and we would go and you know I worked in the Decipher booth doing demos and in the tournament hall running tournaments and my wife was usually with me so she would she was there usually out in the Decipher store right?
[19:42] Jim Colson: So she was there helping you know sell stuff and all sorts of things and having a good time we got to have a shared experience a lot of times. Let me pull something up here. Here we go. So a lot of times the conventions you know they'd have these full screen printed walls. And as a backdrop you know they were just huge walls 10 foot wall maybe 15 20 foot long and they'd have a huge nice gorgeous backdrop those things you know cost thousands of dollars to produce but a lot of times they would have just a carpet wall and they would put up with that with the little velcro stickers on the carpet wall these oversized cards let me show you here I got a couple here's one right here it's got it's the Death Star. And here's another one it's Chewbacca you know it's Chewbacca's head. It's about the same size as my head.
[20:41] Mark: Okay is that what material is it is that like a kind of like a plastic?
[20:47] Jim Colson: It's vinyl it's a vinyl material and they just put little stickers on the back of it little velcro hooks to go on the carpet back. You know we got different ones. Like one of one right like you know. You know they would make a couple but yeah there's some of them that I don't even know where these went the of these ended up probably in the trash bin at the Decipher head headquarters as they were cleaning everything out. Here's just a few of them I just got. I ended up with these because I was doing lots of conventions and at the end of the convention I would you know would pack up and ship that stuff back and sometimes they said you know towards the end it's like you know where do I send this and then it was just like well just hang on to it Jim. You'll be doing another convention. And then over time they just stopped doing conventions and they stopped sending stuff to back to them and stuff like that. Oh that's a cool one. There you go. They saved the good one for the last. So what is that?
[21:52] Matt: Seem to be like pre-special edition, right? That it is that kind of the
[21:57] Jim Colson: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, they're I think all they're all the ones that I have are pre-special edition. But they did I remember seeing a DVD lots you know that's I think that's special edition, right? Yeah, special edition, yeah. I think I remember seeing that. So they did make a few special edition cards, you know, they even had this big vinyl thing they had put right in the middle. You know, oversized thing. So those are some of the fun things that I have floating around. Couple of cool collector items. I think somebody recently did showed one of these. So have you ever seen and then this is really hard to see. Give me just a second. Maybe take it out All right, here you go.
[22:50] Matt: Yeah, I don't know what is it. Yes. Yes, what is that?
[22:53] Jim Colson: So this is a delaminated card where the metal particulate in the inside has delaminated. Huh. And these actually happen to have the backs, right? And these are both delaminated cards. Where it's delaminated. It's not peeled apart. It's actually delaminated. And here's the front, and you notice the front of this one, and you notice what set it came from. Mhm. The back is darker. Cuz this is a little This is the metal edge. The You know, there's a little thin metal layer in these cards, right? And this is the metal edge part This is the piece of the metal, and then the back is a lighter one where the metal is actually delaminated. So, those are not Those are some things you don't see very often. And I'm sure Andy will be watching this and saying, "Hey, how come you didn't tell me about those?"
[23:49] Matt: You're about to get an offer for those items from Andy. Those didn't make the Star Wars CCG Encyclopedia PDF somehow.
[23:56] Jim Colson: Yeah. And so, you find those occasionally. Like I said, I got two or three here. But Okay, story time. All right? Everybody wants stories, so here's a story. So, towards the end I was in Norfolk, Virginia. Work took me there all the time, right? And so, whenever I was there I would take advantage of going into the offices and stuff and buying and saying hi and yakking it up with the guys. And it was towards the end, and the they had just established the Players' Committee. And so, I was kind of there as a PC representative talking to Warren and some of the guys. And it was kind of It was kind of sad to see, you know, right? It's not I don't want to bring a downer note to this, but kind of sad to see. I walked in the offices, and right in the middle of this area was And the garbage wasn't garbage. It was playtest cards. It was just excess inventory. It was and it was not a trash bin that she dumped.
[25:15] Jim Colson: It was a trash bin that she kept of all of the returns and rejects. I'm talking miscut cards, miscolored cards, misprinted cards, miss you name it cards. There was a huge pile of that stuff. Okay, so now Andy is really squirming in his pants. So, I you know and I was just like, "Wow." I mean, it was just It was a huge enormous pile. They said, "Is there anything in here you want to take, Jim?" I was like, "I'LL TAKE THE WHOLE PILE." BUT, no I didn't. I probably should have at least grabbed Jennifer's trash. But yeah, it was pretty sad to see just an amount of stuff that they were trying to just empty clean out the offices and empty out and get rid of stuff and it was It was kind of sad to see all that go, but I grabbed a few boxes of stuff for the players committee and you know and that it wasn't that much, but some cool things that they ended up with. So, yeah. I think some of the other images of the cool things I've got, you know, you've seen all the hot light side with dark side bags you've seen the fade this dark two starter deck with the big watermark that goes across five or six cards.
[26:41] Jim Colson: The water droplet mark. I got a whole page of and these are the cards that are in the collector's guide I think are my cards. The images of my card that you can probably recognize them here. These are probably images of my cards that were used in those images cuz I took a picture of my public I've showed them around a few times but
[27:05] Matt: So Andy while you have those up Andy Talaga actually sent in a few questions. We'll circle back to later but one was specifically can you ask Jim to talk about Premiere Blue? Yeah. Halfway because he wants to document this permanently so cuz the question comes up all the time. What is Premiere Blue? So we're going to timestamp this video right here right now when anyone asks what Premiere Blue is moving forward. Yeah so Jim's explanation.
[27:32] Jim Colson: So as you can see the green there's a yellow pigment right? The the three primary colors are magenta, cyan and yellow right? So when the yellow pigment ran out all they had was the magenta and the cyan and so this is what the card ended up looking like. So clearly the green cards are blue right? And the darker cards ended up being purple but they're also considered to be blue cards as well. And then the red cards missing the yellow ended up pink. And though even though they're not blue they're also considered to be Premiere Blue. So that's that's a pretty good explanation. It's just the cards that were printed missing yellow. You missing the yellow dye.
[28:18] Matt: So quick question what you know this is only in Premiere was this partially because this is the first set they're figuring out how to print it. They're also trying to print as much as possible to meet demand for this game right? Because everybody wanted to buy it and nobody could get enough of it. And you know just back to errors were more common due to like increased demand as well as hey this is the first set we're we're printing and you know there's going to be more errors just based on that. Is is that kind of the explanation why there's no a you know, a new hope blue or you know, cloud city blue?
[28:54] Jim Colson: Yeah, so it's a couple it's a combination of factors, right? For example, Cartamundi was probably the only real place to print really good quality cards in the world. And so their factory in Belgium was just like maxed out. And so if you didn't have a customer service on site person quality control on site person for your products, you had to rely upon their quality control. And I'm not saying Cartamundi didn't have good quality control, what I'm just saying is that unless you had your own guy on site, it is highly likely that things had slipped through. And where Decipher was just starting up, they're just a startup, right? At this point, they'd done Star Trek. And at this point they'd probably really only released one or maybe two sets of Trek. And and so they really didn't didn't necessarily have the capacity to get a European on site helping with quality control. Later on they did, so that helped out quite a bit with later on quality control, but no matter what, you know, you just you're going to have production issues as things go along and as they moved their production to the United States, with PBM Graphics, they had a lot higher opportunity to control the quality a lot more because they could send somebody down to the PBM
[30:27] Interviewer: This might be a slight aside, but are there just because you brought up like the printing, like are there certain delineations in the printing history of Star Wars CCG? Like I noticed when you go from, I think like Hoth to Dagobah, the cards got a lot more glossy. Are there like big milestones in terms of printing that were encountered that you might be aware of.
[30:48] Jim Colson: Yeah, so Decipher learned a lot with Star Trek. I mean, it's amazing Star Trek survived, right? But the thing they learned was that if you could do it domestically, you're in better shape. But they also Star Wars was such a global property that they wanted to keep some of the production, you know, overseas. In the EU in particular. And so and so by exploring printing options in the United States, you eliminated a huge bottleneck and that is customs. Because it took them almost a year to get Alternate Universe out after they printed. And that was their first expansion, and they needed it out a lot sooner than that. And and a majority of that time and delay that was delayed, not the developing and everything, was it was sitting in customs. It just took forever for that step to clear customs. And you know, that was partially Decipher's inexperience of understanding how to how that process worked and everything for large-scale distributions. And and they got better that over time.
[32:04] Jim Colson: But splitting the production across the different companies and moving some of the production into the stateside really helped Decipher a lot. Plus, it took some of the production burden, the workload burden, off of Cartamundi because, you know, as you know at the time Star Trek came out and Star Wars, you know, there was a million little card games starting to burst onto the scene, you know, Middle-earth card game, you name it. Had just all sorts of card games out there. So, all the production facilities, especially Cartamundi, they were just so maxed out. And if you had a slight delay in development, you realize you had to get a slot, a printing slot, 6 months in advance. And if you had a printing delay, a development delay, which caused you to potentially miss that slot, you were maybe delayed 3 months before the next printing slot opened up.
[33:01] Interviewer: So does that mean that the playtesting was taking place about 6 months before printing? So before A New Hope printed, that this is hot probably Dagobah is being playtested.
[33:15] Jim Colson: Yeah. Yeah. And so like literally Premiere, New Hope, and Hoth were pretty much all developed at the same time. I mean they had some refining to do in those in the other two sets, but they were pretty much all developed at the same time, so they would work well together, they would play well together. And so a lot of a lot of that was all developed at the same time. It's where Dagobah came in and it was kind of its own starter playtesting. I remember playtesting Endor. And and it was about six it was about 6 months before the release of Endor that we were up to our armpits in
[33:54] Mark: That's very interesting insights. I actually have a question too on a collecting bent. So you know, I got my old box of reflections with a bunch of fun goodies in there and it's of course called a collector's bounty. So I guess the question kind of just revolves around collecting in general how the folks at Decipher saw it like kind of evolving as the company evolved as well and how that's kind of either gone with the vision of what Decipher had or maybe it's evolved in a different direction with the players committee and the virtual slips. Just thought I'd get a couple of your thoughts on that side.
[34:32] Jim Colson: Oh yeah, so that's that's a really good that's a really good question. I So, personally I was a little slow to adopt the collectors the PCs virtual collector slips. The the ones that they started producing the foil slips and things like that were unique. I have you know, we I don't know how many pages and pages I printed out of the original of the original slips which I think pretty much all gone now because they held they did a whole reboot and changed a lot of that. So, I viewed Okay, so this is my opinion, okay? I viewed the anything that the PC produced as a privately produced item. And so, I was a little bit more purist in collecting exactly the things that came from the actual Decipher domain space. So, I was a little slow to adopt to pick up things. So, so Brian Fred, he's been twisting my arm for months, maybe couple years, that I should start collecting these virtual foil slips because I said, "But you can they can just reprint them anytime they want.
[35:50] Jim Colson: Anytime they want they can just go, 'Okay, well, we're going to go back and reprint all these foil slips again or make a 100 of each or 1,000 of each or 10,000.'" I'm like, "Okay." So, I card company can still kind of do the same thing, but you know, Brian keeps promising me, "No, no, no, they'll never do that. They promised they're never going to do that." I said, "So, what's keeping the files from getting out in the wild and some private individual doing the exact same thing?" And so, I know, no, they protect those things and everything. So, okay. So, he's gradually convinced me over time that they're a collectible. They're as much as any part of the Star Wars CCG history as anything else. And so there you go. Sweet. It looks pretty nice, I have to admit. And so Brian is starting to go back and collect up He was out west at a big event last weekend, I think. And or two. And he's come back with some bounty and we're working a trade and I'm going to end up with a bunch of new foil slips here pretty quick. So yeah, I'm I've kind of come around to the foil slips and starting to collect those as well, too.
[37:05] Jim Colson: So those are on my list of what I'm collecting right now as well, too.
[37:10] Mark: That's cool. Yeah, they are pretty nifty. I know Brian Fred has actually twisted my arm a little bit on that one as well. They're nice and shiny and all that. Like So with Decipher, did they kind of see like collectors gravitating towards the reflection sets and then maybe the main sets would be more for the players? Although, you know, of course you have like the packs, which is part of the fun of opening. So how did that kind of all play into the multiverse of, you know, collecting and playing? I mean, they're kind of play together, but on the other hand, they sometimes butt heads a little bit cuz you know, players want to be able to get the cards to make their decks, but then collectors of course want, you know, some of the rare cards cuz like you said, there's only so many, you know, Luke Skywalker Jedi Knights floating out there, which are a good card for both decks and collectors. So were there any thoughts on that at Decipher or did that change over time or So
[38:08] Jim Colson: So that's interesting that you talked about Decipher and stuff like So you know, towards before the license ended, you know, Decipher had tons of ideas going on. So you've heard of, you You talked about Reflections 2.0. And that was a set they were trying to push out, right? But there are also lots of other plans and they kind of had to do that. They kind of had to have these plans in place because they were still bidding and hoping to get the to retain the license from Lucasfilm. Well, you know, you know, any good soothsayer can read the tea leaves and know that it's all about the money and that because the you know, there was a cost-sharing thing going on with Wizards and Hasbro that it would only once Hasbro brought Wizards, everybody knew that the license was going to go to Wizards because there was profit sharing going on there with Lucasfilm. And so it was like, "Okay. Lucasfilm owns parts of Hasbro and so they're going to make money not only from the license, but they're going to make money from the sales. So it's it's kind of like, "Okay. Yeah." As I said, you know, Decipher was going to lose the license.
[39:27] Jim Colson: It was but they did a super valiant effort to not do that and they had to make plans and show that we know we're going to lose the license and just give up. They didn't they didn't give up. They kept trying as hard as they could. So they had lots of plans and so I remember one time I got a phone call and said, "Hey Jim, would you join the conference call with us really quick?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure." And so they started talking about "Well, we you know, they we want to try and do some cool things that we see in the collector's marketplace." And so we're talking Topps cards now, right? And and so Topps cards was doing these film cells and they were doing all sorts of stuff. And so they said, "Well, what would you do What would you think as a collector if we introduced the film cells, actual film you know, we bought you know, the movies a print of the movies and cut it up and stick stuck it in a Decipher card. I said, well as a collector, I'd love it, right? Absolutely, you got to do something like that, you know? And I talked to him about other relics, you know, fabric relics, you know, film cell relics, other type of relics that you find in the Topps marketplace, which I have a monster collection of that, too, for example.
[40:43] Jim Colson: You know, like I just got this new set of Masterwork in. There's an actual stamp, a UK stamp. You know, this is a brand new Masterwork set that just came out a couple weeks ago. And and there's another one, pretty cool stuff. That's actual a physical stamp in the card. Anyway, so they're talking about doing stuff. They're talking about doing things like this, you know? Yeah, they're you know, that's Emily, Emily Swallow, the Armorer, in Mandalorian. So, they're they're talking about doing all this kind of cool stuff that they're doing with the Topps cards. And I'm like going, oh, yeah. Absolutely do that, I love it, you know? And so, I said, but this is going to it's going to be tough to do to incorporate into gameplay. So, if you do it, going to be have to be a card that not necessarily goes in the decks, but might impact or influence the gameplay. And that's where things like they were thinking like, okay, well, maybe if we just did those that were shields or something like that, cuz you never really shuffle that into your deck. Because you can see, I mean, here's a here's a here's a relic card, right? Here's a relic card with a little metal medallion.
[41:59] Jim Colson: See how thick that card is? There's no way you're going to put that in a deck and shuffle it, right? Yeah, it's not going to work too well. So, with film cells, you're going to end up with a card that was thicker, absolutely, than a normal playing card. There's no way around that. And so, you know, we talked about that. And so, I think that's that was where they were headed. And there's mock-ups out there. I think it's on the Facebook group where you've actually seen the mock-ups of those car somebody has a mock-up of that card. And so, Yeah, so those are the types of things that Decipher was really trying to incorporate to expand not just the player community, but the collecting community as well, too. And they had experience with that because in the Star Trek game space, there were more people who collected Star Trek the card game not the card game, CCG than actually played the game. And I would imagine 80% of their sales went to pure collectors and not game gamers in Star Trek. And so, they want they wanted to bring the Star Wars balance in proportion to the Star Trek one.
[43:20] Jim Colson: Where their primary market were the gamers in Star Wars, there were collectors out there, yes, but not to the same ratios that they had with Star Trek. So, they were trying to do things to bring more of the collectors into the community. And that's the I think that's probably what they were trying to do. And I supported it. I said, "Absolutely." Because you'll just end up selling a ton more product. And the collectors won't care if it's a Vader or a Luke or whatever. They'll they'll get extras of that and they'll just get rid of them because they're just going to want one of each. They don't care if, you know. So, the really big mains, they'll just dump them on the marketplace and make them more accessible to the rest of Star Wars players.
[44:01] Mark: That's definitely fascinating to hear your perspectives there. And I'm just going to hit the collectors drum a little bit harder one more time. So, one of the things that are big here on this channel is the graded cards. And I know it's a little bit polarizing at times. We actually got this Cam card from Cam here. It's a Obi-Wan Kenobi graded by SGC. And that's something I think it's kind of taken off a lot in the last probably 5 or 10 years, especially is the growth of graded cards. So, it's something that's really big in other collector's markets, such as sports and even things like Magic the Gathering and Pokémon. So, I just wanted to get any thoughts on whether, you know, it say Decipher it was anticipated that there'd be, you know, cards that might someday be really desirable or just if you have any other thoughts on grading in general as it comes to collecting.
[44:54] Jim Colson: So, absolutely. I mean, I remember talking to the Decipher guys about graded cards. And as a matter of fact, I think there was even a point where they had discussed entering into some sort of card grading agreement with a company, a PSA or somebody like that, and having cards come right out of the manufacturer right to the graders. And and then marketing those graded cards directly to collectors. So, there were even thoughts in that Decipher space. Wait once Decipher was had its doors open still. But at ultimately at that time, there mass there wasn't a critical mass of people that actually seeking out and trying to understand the potential investment that graded cards are. So, this is the biggest That's the key word there, right? So, one's a collectible and one's an investment. So, if it's graded, it's not it's now no longer considered just a collectible. It's a it's an investment. And so, that's what people have to get their mind around, is that there are people that are willing to invest significant dollars in high-quality collectibles.
[46:12] Jim Colson: And that's where graded, non-disputable, authenticated authentication comes in. And so, yeah, there is a space for graded cards. And that's for investors. If you're not And people can say, "All right, so I invest in gold and precious metals and commodities, etc. I don't invest in cardboard." Well, okay. So, tell that to some of the Magic guys. Tell that to Andy Talaga, right? He did just fine with Magic cards, right? He That's where he made a lot of the money that he's using to buy build his Star Wars collection from is selling Magic cards that he had invested in. So, absolutely, there's a space for graded cards for those that are wanting to invest. For your casual player and collector, you know, they're nice to have if you run across them, but you're not going to see your average Joe chasing after graded cards. Just It's just a little extra expense for you know, it's it's going to be nice to maybe have that graded nine Japanese Vader or something like that, but that's it. So, you know, some of the super power cards that you might want to get graded just to protect and keep encased in protection, but for, you know, that magnetic second tube, yeah, I don't think so.
[47:32] Jim Colson: Sorry.
[47:35] Matt: I think it's interesting cuz it's it's a reframing argument, right? So, I mean, I talk with some folks about my cards like, "Oh, so you toys, you the toys." Like, "Oh, well, they're another collectible." So, you have to reframe toys as collectibles and then collectibles as investments. And it's just a lot of some if the average person looks and thinks that these little cards, you know, the average person walks into a local game store and is like, "Oh, Magic the Gathering, that's a fun toy for children. Like, no, actually it's this, you know, international IP with millions of people collecting and hoarding it and, you know, billions of dollars in the market, but the average person doesn't see it that way. So, you have to it's this argument that I think needs to be made about reframing it from a toy to an investment. So I completely agree though, Jim. Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts on that. Definitely well-valued input there. I think Cam has some crowd-sourced questions that he's got lined up for you. So, there you go, Cam, take it away.
[48:33] Cam: All right, we're going to change the tone here a little bit. We're calling this segment the Legends Corner. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask you myself as someone who's played since 1996, but I didn't even feel qualified to ask the legend Jim Colson some questions. So, I dug into the community, I reached into the archives, I found some other legends of the community that kind of phoned in some questions. Some of these have already been mentioned and answered and then I've got like a question or two of myself in the end. So, first off, Andy Talaga, shout out. Andy's been on Darth Grader before. Most I think most people in the Facebook group know him. He's one of the top, we'll just say collectors of all time. It was a great interview. Oh, yeah. Good dude. Great guy. Love Andy. Anyways. Yeah, we're all huge Andy fans here. So, oh, and these are all people by the way that I have just by happenstance have mentioned your name like in some sort of a story or something. So, I tried to get people you knew. So Andy had the most questions. We'll start off with a couple of his. He wanted to do the premier blue segment that we already touched on. And he asked about the misprint box from I think it was Jennifer you said.
[49:50] Cam: But he also asked, do you have any information about a scrapped Return of the Jedi two-player set? So that's a good one. I think,
[50:06] Jim Colson: I don't I know that they were talking about another two-player box set. But, I don't know why it was scrapped. I think it might have had to do with the lackluster sales of the Premiere and Hoth ones. And so, I think that, that, those were, you just have to look at the sales figures and understand why a product moves forward or doesn't. And, I think just the sales of the slow sales, the nature part of that, it's why the primary reason why that was scrapped. But, there's, Rob Burns is, on the group and, he might be a good question, to kind of randomly put that out there on the Facebook group and tag Rob Burns or, somebody else out there that was in the development, of the product development. So, I think there's a couple people out there in the group that you could probably ping that question to. I don't know that one.
[51:11] Cam: Well, we will get Rob to watch this video. Rob, when you see this, please drop an explanation in the YouTube comments and Matt will pin it to the top. So, we'll have a more detailed answer there. Kind of piggybacking on that question, talking about the two-player sets, and this is if this question showcases the nuance of collecting perfectly. This is as nuanced as it gets, in my opinion. Is there a way to tell the difference between Premiere two-player sets that have a pack of, black border limited or white border limited in the box if it's already sealed. So, I guess you know, some of these boxes varied with what packs they had inside.
[51:56] Jim Colson: They did. And I know I we recognized that early on up front when we were buying them and opening them for whatever reason. I don't know why we'd buy multiples and open multiples, but we would. So, So, no and yes. So, this can drive anybody crazy, too. So, The way you could tell what was The packaging didn't have any difference. So, the provenance means where was that box sold at? So, if it was sold at Kmart, it had a white bordered pack in it. If it was sold at Walmart, it had a white bordered pack in it. If it was sold through your retail hobby shop, it had black bordered packs in it.
[52:47] Cam: Wow, that's that's beyond interesting. That's awesome. That is next level collection strategy from Andy and the insider knowledge from Jim there. So, so if you have a two-player game that's got a sale sticker or something like that on it from Kmart or Walmart, I have one handy. Keep talking and I'll we'll we'll we'll we'll check live on air. Yeah, I think I might have one at my fingertips here, too, real quick. There's there's a super high probability that
[53:20] Jim Colson: There's a super high probability. Now, this is two-player Hoth, but you can see they You can see the Walmart stickers. Yeah. And these are the stickers that you're looking for, right here. See that? Walmart. I don't I don't think I have any of the green affixed or tags on it. So, yeah. So, there Kmart always really good about putting stickers on everything. So, if you run across one of those, it's got a Kmart or Walmart sticker on it is it's usually white bordered. Okay. That's fascinating.
[53:58] Cam: Next up we have already mentioned on the show again the Brian Fred, one of the leading community members. I don't I think every everyone knows Brian Fred at this point. I don't know this story. I'm I'm assuming you know the answer. He kind of set me up here, so I was Who is your friend? I believe he's Japanese who trade you would trade cards with at every convention, and what
[54:29] Jim Colson: So, I think we first met, I believe it was at a DecipherCon in Norfolk. The guy had flown all the way out from Japan just to go to DecipherCon. I was like, you got to be kidding me. And so, we started trading then. I think that's where I got most of my Japanese Jedi Council was from him. Which okay, Young Jedi Council. And because I'd never seen it. I knew that they had Japanese mana, but I never I didn't know they had Jedi Council. And so, I traded a lot with him. And then it was that same year or I think it was maybe that same year then or the next year we met again at the Gen Con. I was helping run some events and we connected up in the Decipher tournament hall. And the guy had Japanese trading card game. No, no, it was Yeah, I think it was a trading card game and Young Jedi and Decipher's Star Wars. And I must I locked him into this trade is probably I don't know a couple thousand dollars worth of cards we were trading in back then. And it took us like 6 or 8 hours to do this trade.
[55:47] Jim Colson: Probably the biggest trade of all time at that point. And and Brian Fred I think was pretty sure he was there at the Gen Con and we were there constantly haggling like over stuff. I mean we traded a lot of cards. And I got a lot of good a lot of good Japanese cards from him. And and I had of course all the English ones so everything you know I it was always a question of what more did he have? What more did he have? What more did he have? Because I had a lot to trade and so everything he wanted he could get from me. It's just and it we had people lined up to trade with him. And they couldn't trade they were leaving because I was we were going through this massive trade that took multi multiple hours to trade. And he got a little frustrated I think at one point so I realized that and so we finished the trade. But ever since then Brian Fred's accused of me keeping him in the basement of my house.
[56:45] Cam: Well with the current state of the Japanese market for those unaware it's it's it's red hot right now. It's totally exploding. It seems like you got the better end of that trade. Yeah I did and somewhere you know the other day I went into some Japanese cards I had and his business card was in there. So I was going to give him a call and see say hello and see if he still remembered me. But I doubt he would forget. That was probably an ordeal that he'll never forget that trade at Gen Con. Well if you get in contact with him I think everyone would be interested in getting more Japanese Star Wars CCG right now. Next up on the list we have forgive me if I pronounce your last name incorrect. We've done tons of trades and deals but Julian [unclear] I he's got some of the more extensive collection and knowledge in the industry as well. His question for Jim is and you if I don't maybe we can do a solo of Jim's background as I ask this question Matt, but Do you Jim even know what treasures you have in your mansion?
[57:56] Jim Colson: All right, so that's a fair question. Like I said, he I thought I had lost those Rebel squad you know, Rebel leaders poster. And then I came across them the other day and I was rummaging through looking for something else and that's always the way it happens is I run across them and I like oh, here they are and I found all the autograph ones and then I found a bunch that were just plain unsigned and so I decided to put those out and make them available to people and you saw probably the Facebook group you saw people posting and showing those off. Of course I kept one for myself, the one with all the signatures on it and that was a lot of fun going around to the conventions and meeting the others squadron members and getting them to sign a sign on that and I know that I was in gold squad so I was pretty tight on only allowing gold squadron members to sign that poster because it was a Y-wing, right? That was gold squadron. So we don't want no red X-wing guys signing this document. So not that they were good all good friends is there's a friendly little rivalry there, you know, we used say we drive the bus because the Y-wings were two-seaters, right?
[59:11] Jim Colson: X-wings were one-seaters, so So we used to say we drive the bus.
[59:16] Cam: That's awesome and that kind of leads me to one of my questions for you and it's more it's this is more documentation of history from Jim's brain, but I got two well three technically tournament items here. If Matt can zoom in, I'm going to put them up to the camera now. One, this is one of the more known tournament foils. I don't know if you can get the glimmer right now. Corellian Corvette, only outclassed probably by the Imperial class Star Destroyer or maybe Qui-Gon. Darth Maul, if you could tell us about those. And then I actually this is one of the more obscure things I think I own that not many people talk about is the tournament pins. So, could you just give us a quick overview of what tournament foils and tournament pins meant to you as a tournament director?
[1:00:06] Jim Colson: Well, so these foils here were all DecipherCon exclusives, right? These are DecipherCon exclusives and they were only if you came you had to choose which one you want. You know, they didn't even give you like well, both the Star Destroyer and the Corvette. They only give you one or the other. So, it was of course everybody liked the Star Destroyer. So, a lot of those were distributed that way through the DecipherCon. And they also put those in the fall after DecipherCon they had some left over. And they put them in the regional tournament kits for the following year. So, if you had a regional event or something like that the in the binder they sent out for the winners and the people top placements they put a Corellian Corvette and the Decipher and a ISD foil in there. And so, they had the they had they were distributing those two methods. So, And these are much rarer in general for the tournament so, if you look at the collector's guide, there should be a picture of the foil tournament foil sheet. And if you look at that, there's 10 of every foil except for one. And there's only one ISD and only one Corvette on each of the foil on the foot those respective light side and side foil sheets.
[1:01:26] Jim Colson: So as a ratio, they're 10 to one more rare than regular tournament foils and they're a limited distribution. You had to go to one of those events where they distributed and that was it. I think that maybe there were a few given out as prizes at that DecipherCon as well, too, but for the most part every registered participant got to pick one.
[1:01:49] Cam: Awesome. And how did what are what's the story of the tournament hands? I'm not even sure I know the answer there. I think it was you could choose what deck you got at the start.
[1:01:56] Jim Colson: Yeah, so they were that was a brainchild idea that you know, send out as part of the tournament kits, you know, because when they were doing [unclear] you would have enough cards to kind of build one side deck. You wouldn't be able to play both sides and so you just going to go through and so they were meant to kind of pin on your shirt and identify you as the light side player that was what it was for and somewhere I still got from all those tournaments I ran I still got a bag full of those sitting around somewhere. Nice. That's a cool collectible right there. They also made keychains and pins. So there's a couple keychains and pins out there, too.
[1:02:44] Cam: Interesting. Interesting. I'll have to be on the lookout to add that to my collection next. My final question for you is kind of to the history of the end sadly of Decipher when it lost its license. You had experience with or some knowledge about a little knowledge about some of the unreleased sets, reflections. We know reflections one, two, and three. I used to have them up here. But there's also talks of reflections four, five, and six and reflections gold. Just kind of curious what the story was with those. I have a couple reflections gold cards here. I was curious if you knew anything about this question pops up so often in the Facebook groups. I get tagged to kind of clarify there was actually an Anakin card beyond just his pilot icon. It just didn't quite get released. A big part of that was the difficulty in game mechanics of trumping Vader with an eight-year-old. As you can see here, he was already apparently overpowered. A playtester knocked him down to player power two from power three. And it does say Vader in bold at the top. So, I'm curious just the general nature of the reflections gold or unreleased reflection set, your knowledge there, and if you have any insight on that infamous Vader mechanic that never released.
[1:04:09] Jim Colson: Yeah, so the gold was never sent out for playtesting. All the playtesting that was done with it was internal. And so, that's why the few rare printed copies that exist, you know, were edited on the spot as they were trying to do some playtesting with them. And and be anytime you just do strictly internal playtesting, you don't get the critical testing abilities of the minds of some of those key top tournament players out there. And how to take a card and really twist it and manipulate it into its worst version. And so, that's where the you know, they did they didn't have time to do that. And so, if you look at a lot of like reflections gold, you know, and the images are all out there. If you if you wanted to go out and find and look at all the different cards, you can. But if you wanted to if you really wanted to really look at those and print those and playtest those, there are some pretty broken cards in that set.
[1:05:14] Cam: I've heard about that. I've heard that the it's a good thing the token is the token system didn't get released into the wild.
[1:05:19] Jim Colson: Yeah. And so the result is that it's a probably a good thing that Reflections gold never hit the streets. Although it they had some pretty cool stuff in it. There were some real mechanic problems that were in there. So
[1:05:39] Cam: Do you do you think we would have seen an Anakin Skywalker, let's say the whole license losing process didn't happen in an alternate universe. How would you have or do you have any insight into how Decipher would have solved the prequels Anakin Skywalker dilemma?
[1:05:56] Jim Colson: Well, so you get you can't have Star Wars without Anakin, right? Yeah, it's not going to happen. So they would have they would have had to figure out how to do that. And and of course how do you do that? And in they have experience of doing that a little bit, you know, they could do like they did in Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, do blocks, do you know, say you could have different time frames or sets that are only compatible with each other at a certain time frame or a block, you know, episode one. Cuz you know that was in the thought process. That's why all the episode one cards have an episode one icon on them. Right. We never used it. There were There was rarely any cards that targeted, but that was there because of a very specific reason to potentially move to blocks. And say, "Okay, we're going to have events and formats episode one only." And that way they can have Anakin.
[1:07:00] Matt: So just a quick follow-up there. Do you think, you know, this is all speculation, but if the license hadn't have been lost that they would have maybe done a second edition, right? Like they did with Star Trek. Because like looking at the two-sided backs, it is a clunky mechanic when you look at like from a modern, you know, gaming standpoint. Like obviously the '90s was like the heyday of CCGs and everything was just kind of like being figured out as they went along, but I just think that there's a world where there's a more streamlined product that would have been easier for production, easier for you know, every like Lord of the Rings, right? You have different cultures or races in there that's just an indication at the top. And that was sort of in the works or, you know, thoughts. I mean, clearly they learned that from Star Wars not to have different backs, right? It's like such a mess, right? To have two backs, two of everything, you know, it's it's funny when you think about it, but
[1:07:58] Jim Colson: And so So, your Lord of the Rings and the and all their subsequent games, even so Young Jedi had the two different backs as well, but still they I think they there would have been a second edition. I think that the in the end, while they didn't want it, it would have had it would have gotten to the point where they had to have it. So, you noticed Wars, right? Wars doesn't have There's three major factions, maybe five in total. They've only got one back. Yeah. So, you're looking at possibly, you know, the future of second edition Star Wars.
[1:08:44] Cam: For for those that don't know, after Decipher lost the license, they did release I think it was a premiere set and an expansion set. I've got a couple in the back. And it's base it's called Wars, not Star Wars, and it's based on their own IP of their own intergalactic space story and the mechanics are almost identical to Star Wars. There's just a few tweaks. I think the key one is giving you an like up to four cards per deck. So there's a cap on the number of cards you can use which is brilliant in hindsight. Like Asteroid Sanctuary. But then there's all and then also there was more than light side and dark side to Jim's point and it wasn't shown through the back of the card to Matt's point. Yeah. So I think the card backs were cool though, you know, nothing like having that rebel symbol out there or the Imperial symbol out there.
[1:09:42] Jim Colson: But they had they were going to have to get away from it because what about the Republic symbol? What about, you know, all the expanded universe symbols, you know? How are you going to build decks based upon those things and have a Imperial symbol on the back? So there were all these pieces in play and motion coming out that were really going to take us down the road to a common back. I just think that while there was a massive discussion continually going on, there was there would have been a critical mass, a critical point in time where they would had to just said, "Okay, look, one back, reboot 2.0, you know, build your decks. It's going to have a single back."
[1:10:27] Matt: Yeah. Well, I guess for us with these collections it's good that didn't happen because like the cards would have become worthless from the first edition, right? I guess
[1:10:37] Jim Colson: Well, so valueless. So so let me go down that road a little bit. So you know what cards are worth more in Star Trek? First edition or second edition?
[1:10:46] Matt: I'm going to guess second edition, right? Nope. I would guess first for what we're seeing in Magic. Yep.
[1:10:53] Jim Colson: I mean it's the older cards are collectibles. I don't I really don't think that the cards, collectors-wise, would be use- worthless. Now, that's There's a massive schism that had happened when they came out with second edition is a lot of first edition players says, "I'm quitting the game. I'm not going to play the game anymore." Right? But, and they and that happened. There was a drop-off. But, they were able to weather that drop-off because 80% of the sales of Star Trek were collectors. And so, 80% of their audience did not go away. So, you know, the organized play suffered a little bit for a while. But, they ended up with a, you know, a better product. I mean, the game the second edition game, well, I grew up on first edition. It was a much more streamlined and a much more pleasant experience to play. So, I think that the Decipher learned a lot of lessons from both their Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, and they would have been able to incorporate those in the Star Trek second edition Star Wars second edition. I've kind of said that they didn't get the opportunity to do that.
[1:12:03] Matt: Yeah, Jimmy, you're really bumming me out that they didn't get the opportunity to do so. I mean, I think when I compare it to other card games, like Decipher just made such pretty cards, you know, iconic looking Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. I can't speak to Star Trek. I haven't I haven't really gotten into it, but just such good looking cards, you know, high quality product. It bums me out that they don't
[1:12:33] Cam: I got to hammer home that point. You can't get through an episode with Mark and I without mentioning that this card game just is so important from a collector's standpoint to me. It stands out to any Star Wars fan cuz this is one of the few games that worked directly with Lucasfilm. There is photos of outfits or equipment that aren't in the movie. There's different angles, there's custom shots, there's custom lore, and I believe you know, some of that has been even like used in current media and future Star Wars as inspiration for something. So, I just can't name anything like it from a collector standpoint. If you're collecting this game, you're collecting a part of Star Wars history. How do you feel about that, Jim?
[1:13:19] Jim Colson: Oh, without a doubt. I mean, there is Star Wars canon that came from the CCG, period. I mean, without a doubt, names of characters for one thing, right? Correct. Of the characters just didn't have names until the Decipher named them, and that became their names.
[1:13:39] Cam: Am I making it up or did the Krayt Dragon also come from the card? Is that
[1:13:46] Jim Colson: So, yes, that is absolutely true that the visualization, the final interpretation of the Krayt Dragon in Mandalorian was drawn from the Decipher visualization on the card, Decipher's card, absolutely.
[1:14:01] Cam: I remember the employee posting that in the group when we when the Mandalorian episode came out, and you could almost like feel his emotion through the post. He was like, "Oh my gosh, my work from 20 years ago was just repurposed to create a Krayt Dragon by Disney in The Mandalorian, and that's all because of this card game." Not all because, but it's I mean, it was he basically was the first to create and show what a Krayt Dragon was, and that was
[1:14:30] Matt: Yeah. Well, I think that might actually be a nice high note to end it on. I think we maybe you want to do a quick Do you have any other things to show and tell? Maybe three or four minutes of show and tell if you have anything left in your cache. Where do I start? We could do a whole different, you know, a whole different segment just on show and tell. Yeah, we could. Or Mark and Cam, do you guys have other questions?
[1:15:03] Cam: Well, while he gets organized, what's your one What's your rating on a scale of 1 to 10 of the Disney Star Cruiser experience? I'm asking cuz you sent us photos, fully an outfit from Disney this last week. Worth it? Yes.
[1:15:17] Jim Colson: So, is it worth it? So, any once-in-a-lifetime experience I think is worth it, right? So, you just have to put a dollar value on that and decide whether you do it or not. So, there were eight of us in the largest cabin that they offered, which is a 12 grand for 2 nights. Not too bad. And we divided that up. That works out to be about $750 per person per night. You know, there's no discrimination between the adults and children. So, the fact that there were five kids and three adults meant that was a pretty expensive ride for the kids. But the experience is immersive, meaning that you want to come show up in your best costumes and be prepared to have maybe two or three costumes to wear throughout the experience, the 2 or 3-day experience. And so, you want to you want to be prepared to share your enjoyment of the Star Wars universe with other people and not be the guy walking around with the you know, with the Alabama or Kansas City baseball hat and stuff like that. So, you're just you're there not there as a sports fan, you're there immersed and so that people walk by and say, you know, "Oh, what planet are you from?" type stuff.
[1:16:36] Jim Colson: And the cast are really good about "Oh, Earth, I haven't heard of that place. Alabama, where's that where's that where's that Alabama at? You know, and stuff like that. So, they're they're really good at the immersion aspect of the experience. And it's so you might hear some people saying that it's really scripted. And well, that's good because you can participate in that scripted activity that they have or not. So, my wife and I participated in some. She did a little bit more than I did. I kind of took advantage of the relaxing downtime and enjoyed the unlimited food that was exceptional. It was just like all you can eat all the time, just like any other type of cruise. It's this was a galactic cruise and it was a lot of fun. It was it was worth it. Yeah, we would we're not going to do it every year. You know, 3 grand for the two of us every year would you know, I can buy a lot of cards with that, you know.
[1:17:52] Matt: Well, Jim, thank you so much for chatting with us. Mark or Cam, do you have any kind of closing thoughts? I think this has been such a running the gamut here from graded to you know, inside the brain of some [unclear] the game. This has just been really interesting and I'm hoping folks
[1:18:20] Cam: Yeah, thank you so much, Jim. Hopefully we'll be sharing clips of this video for years to come for new and returning players. Anyone out there, we have a passionate fan base in all the Facebook groups. Just Star Wars CCG, Star Wars CCG graded. And I to see you there.