Jamie Thingelstad

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tyler and I went on a drive around the cities yesterday to check out some Pokémon card shops in town. This was a similar trip to our Game Store Tour in February. This was focused solely on Pokémon!

Viral Card Games

Our first stop was Viral Card Games in Fridley. We both liked this shop a lot. It was likely the most organized and well structured card shop that we had been in. They had a several glass cases with graded and raw cards on display in a wide range of prices. They were super helpful pulling cards out to give them a closer look.

The big differentiator for Viral Card Games was their bulk management. Most card shops simply have dozens of boxes filled with thousands of cards grouped by their sets. The team at Viral has fully embraced the TCG Player system with two very large screen kiosks in the store so you can search their entire bulk collection with ease, add the cards you are looking for, and then they will bring those out for you. With a couple searches I was able to grab the first 3 of a 9 card illustration set that I’m looking for.

I also grabbed the final card for a 3-card illustration set.

This is also the only downside that Tyler and I had. The tradeoff of amazing bulk management is less fun flipping through binders and browsing different things. If Viral also had several binders to bridge the gap between the amazing bulk system they have and the singles under the counter it would be about perfect.

Ultimate Collectibles Warehouse Sale

Our second stop was a tip from my brother-in-law Max — Ultimate Collectibles was having their “Warehouse Sale” at the Hopkins VFW. We had no idea what to expect but were excited to head over and check it out. There was no real signage but the full parking lot on a Saturday afternoon was a sign we were in the right spot.

Ultimate has a lot of sports memorabilia and more than half of the sale was that, but if you watched the foot traffic the vast majority of that was there for the Pokémon sets they were selling. They had a huge collection on display and the prices were pretty good — above retail but not typical card shop pricing.

Ultimate is the more typical card shop experience with just piles of stuff and you need to dig around to find what you want. The warehouse sale was just piles of boxes on folding tables. They also had a good selection of singles on display but the focus for this event was moving large boxes.

It was awesome to check out and Tyler and I got our first Ultra-Premium Collection box ever here — snagging one of the last three left before they all were taken.

MN Poke Pulls

After a quick coffee stop in Hopkins, we made our way to MN Poke Pulls in Plymouth timed just after their pretty late 2:00 PM opening time. We had planned to start here until we realized they weren’t even open until much later. That is a pretty late starting time, especially given that they don’t host tournaments, but I suspect it is because of the origin of the store around Whatnot.

So a quick Whatnot detour if you, like me, have no idea what this is. The owner of this store started on Whatnot by streaming Pokémon boxes that viewers auction for in real-time. Once the auction is won, the box is immediately opened and they go through all the packs. The purchaser of the box then gets the cards that are valuable sent to them.

To me this seems strange as I would want to open the box and packs together at home. Tyler and I have fun doing that. But if you are a big collector and you have opened 10,000 packs already it is different. Here you get to outsource the opening part as well as the raw management of all the bulk that you get. You just get the stuff that you really want. Meanwhile the Whatnot viewers all get to share in the fun of opening and the “hits” when opening the packs.

With that backdrop this store had huge volume of packs as that is what they need to run the Whatnot events. They had a few cases with singles and graded cards, but not a ton. They didn’t have prices on anything which Tyler and I both dislike. They also have a giant messy pile of bulk cards for $0.10 each if you want to do that.

Overall a fun place to stop but it is like a warehouse inside and you wouldn’t spend a ton of time hanging out and browsing.

Lost Zone Cards

Our last stop was Lost Zone Cards in Bloomington. This ended up being the least Pokémon focused shop of the day, and unfortunately was even more so when we arrived and heard their Pokémon stuff was gone that day for a show in Wisconsin. The photo below you can see the left-most case is empty.

Overall this seemed like a great place for a variety of card games and they had a big area for tournaments — but was the least exciting of the day for Pokémon collectors.

We have a lot of fun exploring these places. On our list for shops to check out still are Krakenhits in Fridley and The Forge in Chaska.

Commanding performance by Verstappen to take the lead on the first turn and never let up the entire Las Vegas GP — winning by 17 seconds. Impressive!

Tyler and I opened our first Pokémon Ultra-Premium Collection tonight. No big pulls but some good fun.

After we’ve made hundreds of candles for the Candle Fundraiser it is fun to casually pour a bunch of individual scents to try out. Ten scents poured tonight for the 2025 Scent Survey.

“Oh, I know I have that Pokémon card in here somewhere. Just let me look in this pile.” 😳😆 at MN Poke Pulls TCG.

I don’t know when or what app did this but I finally purged a bunch of Twitter “profile” values from my Contacts database. Little housecleaning. Related.

MnTech Elevate was hosted in the Delta Sky360° Club at U.S. Bank Stadium and we got to take tours of the stadium including the locker room, going onto the field, seeing the Gjallarhorn, and the nicest couches you could watch a football game from.

We had a great TeamSPS presence at MnTech Elevate tonight celebrating the local technology community and recognizing Tekne award winners! 🏆

Selfie with Joel Crandall, CEO of MnTech, moments before we kick off the very first MnTech Elevate event!

Paragraph has now merged with Mirror and I decided to set up cross-posting to give it a try. Paragraph will pull posts from my RSS feed to show on my publication there as well.

Burning this many wooden wick candles at once is actually pretty noisy — so much crackle! 😮

I was listening to The Omni Show — How Jorge Arango Uses OmniFocus. It was an overall good episode and at the end Arango shared a reference to Gall’s Law. I had not heard of this before so I looked it up:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

Arango was sharing this in reference to GTD systems — build a simple system that works and then figure out what you need from there. But I keep coming back to this because I think this happens in software and technology frequently.

I’ve been thinking about big enterprise system changes that companies have to make and the huge challenge that you face is really fighting Gall’s Law. These systems are always complex and due to the domain you cannot start simple — you have to start complex.

Gall’s Law is worth keeping in mind.