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My Halloween Village 2024: Pet/Cemetery Edition

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Setting up my Halloween Village decorations has been a tradition of mine for as long as I can remember. Well, that's not entirely true...I vaguely remember getting Haunted House for the Atari 2600 in an Easter basket at some point, which definitely happened before the first time I set up a Halloween Village, but even that memory is pretty on-theme so whatever. Anyway, I've written many posts and posted several videos about my Villages, as the setup is different every year, with significant variance in what pieces I display (I would need an entire room fully dedicated to the Village to display everything I actually own. Hmmm...there's an idea...). Consequently, one of my annual traditions that has formed alongside this is browsing each year's new releases from Dept. 56 and Lemax. This usually occurs sometime mid-spring. If nothing else, I can't be accused of lack of preparation. Lemax and Dept. 56, for those not as deeply ensconced in the holiday village displa

Collecting the Sailor Moon CCG: The Definitive Guide to an Unexpectedly Difficult Task (UPDATED June 2024)

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In 1993, a little card game by the name of Magic: The Gathering hit the market, and the gaming world would never be the same. All of a sudden, a new, addictive and scalable form of gaming had arrived, requiring little up-front investment to start playing but, once it got its hooks in someone, could potentially bleed their wallet dry one dopamine-promising booster pack at a time. It was sort of a spiritual precursor to today's free-to-play video games laden with microtransactions. Magic was a huge hit, amassing a huge fan base globally and becoming such a phenomenon that, even decades later, its profitability is basically propping up a massive toy company. So, as you might imagine, the tremendous success of Magic made the collectible card game concept very attractive. As such, over the next decade or so, there was a collectible card game (CCG) for practically every property you can imagine. No, really. Think about anything popular from the 90s and there was probably a CCG for it.