A Clean Slate

On Friday Danny texted me and told me Ryan was at his place to buy cards and told me I should come over. Ryan and Adrian are two fellow old-school players who took an extended break between the start of the format and now. Looks like they'd like to play more regularly again and were wanting to buy stuff. Before I got this text, I was packaging up some stuff that I'm selling to Troll (I seriously sell to them like every week lol), and thought about some cards that I had that I originally wasn't planning on selling. I thought about how I couldn't play until the ban list was revealed, so I thought "I should just sell my Hornets". The nice thing is that Troll is paying $30 each for them, and I picked them up on eBay/trades for less.

My rationale for doing so was:
- If Hornet goes to 2, they'll probably go down to $15 each.
- On top of this, ORCS SE will put more Hornets into the market, further reducing its price. Maybe to $10.
- Even if Hornet stayed at 3, ORCS SE itself will reduce its value, probably to like $12-15. Basically the "Kizan" effect.

I also realized I had amassed 12 Pot of Dualities. I had unknowingly hoarded Dualities and figured those had to go as well, as I'm a firm believer that hoarding going into a new list only leads to profit loss. If for some random reason they went to 2 or 1, I'd take a huge hit. If they stay at 3, well the tins are still relatively easy to find or I'd simply re-buy a set. They haven't gone up in value like many expected them to, and I've been sitting on them for quite a while. Between the 3 Hornets and 12 Duality, that's an extra $200 I'd have available for post-list reveal shopping.

So I packaged all the stuff up, went to the post office (which again took an unbelievably long time) and got things shipped. Went to Danny's and Adrian and Ryan were there. We chat a bit and I do a trade with Ryan, getting rid of my extra set of Tengus, Doomcals, and some other random things. I was glad since it was all stuff that Troll wouldn't buy. Ryan wants to buy another box of ORCS because he's trying to build Ninjas and not many people around here have the stuff for trade, so we go to T&M's. The only ORCS box they had had 15 packs left, but the owner offers him a discount so he buys them all and a pack of sleeves. He pulls the Secret Synchro Daredevil guy, a Hanzo, a Hornet, and the rest was whatever. 8 holos, so pretty much got a whole box worth. He decides on the spot that he wants to build/incorporate Inzektors into something, and he actually makes a pretty neat TG/Inzektor deck with 2 Hornet proxies. I show him what I was running, and he wants to buy my 2 Maxx C's. I was like "uhhhh", a little hesitant, thought about it for a while, and figured "OK, I'm not gonna take any risks whatsoever with this list, so why not" so I sell the 2 for $120. I figured if Royal Oppression came back, their value may go down, and naturally if they went to 2 or 1, for again, some reason.

At this point I literally don't have a deck built nor do I think I can build anything. I can't even build something as budget-y as stun since I don't have Dualities, lol. It's all good though since that basically puts me in a "clean slate" state and I'll simply do a lot of shopping/predicting when the list gets revealed. Admittedly I am already getting antsy for it, frequently checking Shriek and various banned/restricted threads. I'll be going pretty hard on purchases depending on what the list looks like, and I may be pre-ordering a case of Battle Pack for myself, more if teammates are interested.

I'll probably go to Northtown tomorrow anyway to hang out and maybe do a few trades/buys.