Happy Birthday, Lillie!
Kicking us off this week, I’d like to say happy birthday to Lillie! Lillie’s birthday was on September 4th. When Mike announced her birthday, he said she was born when a lily pad had opened up for the first time in over a hundred years. Seriously though, Lillie, I hope you had a wonderful birthday! I can’t wait to see what you continue to do with MetaZoo!
Added Color’s Seance Song
We got our first tease of the Seance song by Added Colors. The song starts with a music box kind of beat to it. About 20 seconds into the teaser, more instrumentals pick up in the song. Then, roughly 40 seconds in, the lyrics start! From the very brief lyrics that we heard, it sounds like the song is about the veil shattering.
LGS Partnerships
The sign-ups for Seance LGS Partnerships have gone live, so if you’re an LGS and want to become a partner, you need to fill out this form to sign up for that. As part of the form, there’s a link to the partnership details you need to agree to become a partner.
Partners will get allocation directly from MetaZoo at distributor pricing for up to 500 of each SKU. Partner allocations will ship directly from MetaZoo. They will also get special prize support and MPN kits as part of the Partner Program. Partners will still receive two LGS kits as well as special MetaZoo partner promos. As with existing Partners, they will have access to special direct-to-consumer products such as Magicast, Revive, Fan Art packs, and more.
For an LGS to qualify for partnership, they need to be signed up and registered on the MPN. If the LGS is an online only store, they still need to put on events in a rented space or engage in some other form of community building; such as creating YouTube videos, writing articles, organizing meetups, really anything that helps build the community! The LGS also needs to be signed up on the store locator. They need to host at least 3 MetaZoo sanctioned play or release events on the MPN per month. The LGS will also need to agree to the same MAP and MSRP rules that were laid out with UFO. As a reminder, the MAP price is 80% of MSRP, and MSRP prices need to be guaranteed for 1 week before the release and 2 weeks after the release. Pre-orders cannot be shipped until the day before the street date (October 21st, 2022).
The LGS needs to agree to the brick-and-mortar online sale rules, which state that partners and brick-and-mortar storefronts, except for using streaming platforms such as WhatNot or Drip, cannot sell more than 20% of their partner allocation online. Partners that are entirely online cannot sell online in a typical online marketplace; All sales need to be channeled through a Patreon or some other form of membership platform. If you’re familiar with Rudy/Alpha Investments you know exactly what this looks like. Partners that are entirely online can sell up to 20 of their allocation on streaming platforms like WhatNot and Drip. Sales of singles are allowed in online marketplaces and streaming platforms. However, single sales are not allowed until the day before the street date.
The allocation rules are very similar to UFO. The LGS needs to take 10% of the max allowed allocation, which would be a minimum of 50 out of the 500 units of each SKU. If they fail to take 10% of their max allocation they will be removed as a MetaZoo partner. They also agree not to resell their allocation to another store, influencer, streamer, or similar. Finally, and this one has bitten a few LGS owners in the past, they need to continue to uphold the high standards of community development and support expected of an LGS that represents the MetaZoo brand. To put that a little more bluntly, if you are a MetaZoo partner you are a brand ambassador and a brand ambassador is somebody that supports the brand. If you are publicly smearing MetaZoo, you should not expect to be allowed to be a partner.
The LGS Partnership announcement was the first time we received information about the pre-order periods for Seance. The pre-order starts on October 5th, 2022 for partner LGSs and October 10th, 2022 for non-partner LGSs. Seance officially releases on October 21st, 2022; a week before the Salem release event.
Immortal from Immortal Workshop, a fellow Archivist for The MetaZoo Archives and the sponsor of my YouTube channel, is hoping to become a partner. I hope that he gets a chance to become one.
Full-stack Developer Wanted
MetaZoo has announced in their Discord that they are looking to hire a Full-stack Developer to work on the website and some other apps, likely pertaining to the website. This is incredibly exciting for two reasons: Firstly, when they are hiring they are reaching out to the community to let them know that they have a position open. A lot of the people in the community are eager to work for MetaZoo. Secondly, this means that we’re going to be getting updates to the website and new functionality that will likely bridge the gap between the MetaZoo website and other MetaZoo applications, such as the MPN, and bring everything together in a more cohesive manner.
A New Spirit Caster?
During a MetaZoo hour this week, we got a look at what I assume is a new spirit caster. The art depicts a caster coming through a ring of spirits. If this is art for a Caster card, I imagine that this Caster is not going to be a good individual. They seem to be more evil-aligned. With the rate that we’re getting Seance spoilers, I imagine we’re going to find out pretty soon.
Spirit Tower Promo
The second tease we received during the MetaZoo hour was a quick post and deletion of the Spirit Tower promo art. It depicts a very tall tower with purple skies and a pinkish-purple ring around the top of the tower. It is set in autumn, likely sometime around Halloween, and has gravestones littering the front of the tower. It’s no surprise, if you’ve been following my content, that I believe the Salem release event will be a tower event, so I’m hoping we’ll be getting to see this soon; around October 29th, maybe?
Second Anniversary Celebrations
The Second Anniversary Celebrations cards are in-hand at MetaZoo and we are finding out that there are going to be two color variants. There is the normal coloring that we expect and there is a second that is a little bit lighter. I imagine what happened is that there was a mass printing error at the printers that made for a large number of these promos being lighter colored and MetaZoo is rolling with it. If I’m being completely honest, I like the lighter color promo better.
Gold MetaZoo Supporter Medal
We have our first look at the Gold MetaZoo Supporter Medal. Alongside the image above, Mike had said “This is gold and quite nice… but what if it were a gold metal… medal? HMMM”. The flavor text on the card also reads “You know their name; you recognize their avatar; a true legend.”. This is very likely what we’ve been referring to as “The Discord Medals” over the past couple of weeks.
It is unclear what part of the card will be made of metal. It could be just the medal that is next to Sam Sinclair; it could be metal foiling for the holofoil background; it could be the entire card! Looking back at the original announcements of the Discord medals, it was also teased that there would be silver and bronze versions of these medals as well. It is also unclear how many people will be eligible for the medals or how one becomes eligible for a medal. A lot of people have assumed that it is related to Discord rank, so when these were announced I started seeing people be a bit more active in Discord, I saw some people being overly active in the Discord, and I’ve seen some instances of people spamming the .flork command in the Flork and Memes room. Another viable option is that MetaZoo keeps a close eye on their Discord and they know who is active and helping the community. They could hand-pick the individuals that are going to be receiving these medals.
I can think of a few people that are consistently active in Discord, keep the conversation light and flowing, are incredibly helpful to new and existing members of the MetaZoo Discord, and deserve to have one of these medals.
Trick no Treat
We received more information about Trick no Treat this week. The first drop was a sketch of a chibi Grim Reaper wearing a Loveland Frogman suit. We do already know that we will be getting a Loveland Frogman mask as well as a Mothman mask and I think that with this sketch we can also expect to have a Grim Reaper mask.
On top of that, we did get a look at an artifact mask card that we’ll be getting with this set; the Indrid Cold mask. The card itself is called Activated Indrid Mask and that’s a play on “activated charcoal mask”, so I find that to be quite funny. You must be wearing a mask to contract the card and it allows you to equip it to a Beastie. The equipped Beastie loses all its traits, cannot gain traits and becomes a dark aura Beastie. Now, I’m assuming there is a bit of a typo on this card because it adds effect text to the equipped Beastie that adds dark to all dark beasties you control or beasties with a mask equipped. How do you add dark to an already dark beastie? It doesn’t quite make sense. Will that typo make it to the finalized version? We are going to have to find out.
Flork LGS Boxes
With the Flork shirt sales successfully behind us, it was announced this week that they are going to have Flork LGS boxes. It’s unclear from the announcement what these boxes will contain but I do imagine it’s going to be a shirt.
Shortly after the announcement, they showed the letters “LGS” in Flork’s style. I imagine that the shirt, promo, LGS box, or some combination therein will be stamped with this LGS styling.
Seance Spellbook
We finally got our first look at the full spellbook for Seance. This has the tome-esque art that we’ve previously seen with the golden hands in each corner. A seance ring is now seen in the middle of the art and resembles the spin wheel from Long Beach Collect-a-con. The spellbook will have the normal contents: 10 booster packs, a holofoil promo, a metal coin, a rule book, 60 sleeves, a token sheet, and an aura deck. It has also been teased multiple times that the aura deck in the Seance spellbook is going to have a holo aura in it, similar to what they used to do with the CN2 spellbooks.
Seance Blister Packs
We also now know what all four blister packs for Seance look like. All four of the art you see above have been designed by Poncho. The first one we have in the front is Ghosts of the Sloss Furnaces. This is a dual aura spirit/fire beastie. It’s a two-drop, costing one spirit and one fire aura, and you can have three per spellbook. The second promo we see is some sort of devil. I was not able to find the true name of this beastie. This, however, is the Beastie that we’ve seen on the pack art and the Seance mat. It is a one-drop dark beastie with 30 life points. Next, we have a new moth creature as the third promo. This moth is a three-drop, costing one dark and spirit aura to contract. It is a dark/spirit beastie and has 35 life points. The flavor text on this promo mentions that a seance is needed to wake people up from sleep if they are affected by this beastie. With this in mind, I imagine that one of the powers that this beastie will have is the power to put opposing beasties to sleep. Lastly, the fourth promo we have is The Black Dog of Hanging Hills. The name of the card itself is not visible in the teased image, but you can see the name in the flavor text down below. The Black Dog is a two-drop, one neutral one spirit beastie with 35 life points. I am excited that they decided to do four different promos again since this makes the blister packs very collectible and it gives a reason to order multiples of the same blister pack.
Seance Theme Decks
If you have been looking around websites that sell MetaZoo lately, you actually might be seeing Seance pre-order placeholders pop up. With the placeholder art that has been provided, we can figure out the aura types of the theme decks we have not seen yet. We know about two theme decks already; Saint Germain’s dark/spirit them deck and Love’s water/earth theme deck. From the pre-order placeholders, we can’t tell which beasties are headlining the other three theme decks, but we do know that they are dark/light, forest/spirit, and fire/light. I’m pretty excited about the forest/spirit deck because that means I might be right about a spirit Bigfoot existing. I can’t wait to figure out what the three beasties that are going to be headlining these theme decks are going to be!
Kansas City Collect-a-con
Kansas City Collect-a-con is fast approaching! It will be on the same dates as the Mothman Festival; September 17th and 18th. MetaZoo will be hosting a tournament at Kansas City Collect-a-con and the participants of that tournament will have a chance to win the coveted 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place medals in the tournament. On top of those medals, the winners will walk away with a UFO bundle featuring one of every core UFO product. On both the 17th and 18th, MetaZoo will be holding a casual, sealed, learn-to-play event to encourage new players to pick up MetaZoo!
Future MetaZoo Collaborations
Mike had asked the entire chat this week if they were given a blank check to do a collaboration, who would we want to see MetaZoo work with in the future? The chat erupted with ideas for well over an hour; coming up with a bunch of different collaborations! These ideas poured in long after Mike had hinted that we should move on to new topics. Honestly, this is a great way for MetaZoo to get an idea of what the community wants to see, as well as find partnerships that MetaZoo had never thought of yet. What better reason to run a community than to get community feedback on what the company could be looking to do in the future?
While I’m up on this soapbox, I would personally like to see a Lego collaboration. I feel that there’s a lot that MetaZoo could do with Legos and the Lego brand spans a very wide age group. It would fit the nostalgia factor of the older age groups as well as appeal to the younger crowd who might just be getting into Legos.
Later in the week, Mike had then asked “who should we partner with? Spotify? YouTube? Amazon? iTunes? All of them?”. It would seem that we could be looking forward to some of these collaborations in the future. Spotify and iTunes make sense with the Added Color songs. As we get into the IP there is going to likely be some original soundtrack that goes with that, which also fits these partnerships. I am curious what they would do with YouTube. That could encourage people to do more live streams on YouTube. An Amazon partnership would be likely some form of special product on Amazon. It would be great exposure for MetaZoo to be on one of the largest selling platforms in the world! I would be curious to see what they would sell on Amazon because I do feel like partnering with Amazon somewhat conflicts with the narrative that they have around supporting the LGS. If it were a special release similar to what they’ve done with eBay maybe that would be great! However, if they start putting core products on Amazon I feel like this would end up hurting LGSs as a whole. I’m excited to see what they could do with Amazon but I’m also a little bit skeptical of this partnership.
UFO is in Walmart!
UFO hangers have landed in Walmarts this week! These are similar to the hangers that we saw for Wilderness. They contain three packs and, surprisingly, the three packs are first edition! I did expect Walmart to get the big box treatment with UFO, but possibly the big box logo or design was not ready when the UFO hangers went into production. This also means, however, that you can pull space rares, or any UFO secret rare, in these Walmart hangers. Each hanger also can have one of three different promos! On the box, you can see Lechuza alongside two mystery cards. The other two promos that you’re able to get are Hatman and Pamola. If you’re looking for this in a Walmart, these hangers are no longer kept in a white half-box like the Wilderness hangers. With Wilderness, it was very hard to tell if they were on the shelves from quickly looking and if they were sold out. With UFO, however, the half boxes are MetaZoo branded! You’ll be able to easily tell where they are on the shelves and if they had them in stock, but are currently sold out.
Red Bordered Tarot Cards
The red-bordered tarot cards have been revealed this week! These will be first available on October 6th, which coincides with New York Comic Con. It has already been confirmed in Discord that the tarot cards will be available at New York Comic Con, so if the date makes sense. The tarot cards that we have seen up to this point have been the black-bordered samples that were released at Long Beach Collect-a-con. It has been confirmed that these will be sold as an eBay Live exclusive item.
MetaZoo X eBay Live is also making its debut at New York Comic Con, so keep an eye on the Discords and keep an eye on anything related to eBay and MetaZoo in early October to secure yourself a set of tarot cards. It is still unclear whether or not we’re going to be able to buy a full set of tarot cards or if this is going to be released similar to a booster pack; where we need to collect a number of cards and trade them with other people to collect the whole deck of tarot cards. Due to the functionality of tarot cards outside of the MetaZoo TCG, I expect that it’s going to be able to buy the full deck of cards.
Space Rares
A new Space Rare has been pulled this week and was pulled by another content creator while opening packs for his patrons. Argos, of Argos Anonymous, has pulled a Sky Snake! This marks the 12th known space rare card to be pulled and is the 8th unique card art that we’ve seen that was sent into space. This Sky Snake is 8/10. There are still 4 more space rares that we haven’t seen; the two cosmic beasties, which I speculate are UFO and Grays, the Spirit beastie which we know is Lechuza due to previous teases, and the neutral beastie, which is widely thought to be Mike, the Headless Chicken.
If you want to keep up with the space rare pulls or any other serialized rares in MetaZoo, check out AlanJai’s space rare tracker. If you ever get lucky enough to pull a serialized card, be sure to rare reach out to Alan in the MetaZoo discord so he can add it to the tracker!
HiroQuest
HiroQuest is finally showing up on our doorsteps! There was no indication that we should have expected this to start shipping so soon outside of shipping notifications being sent via email. There has been a ton of excitement around HiroQuest over the last couple of days. The original shipping timeframe was set for mid-September, so for everybody complaining about late things coming from MetaZoo; can’t talk about this one!
Members of the community have been showing off their pulls and there are a few things that we now know about HiroQuest. Every single card in the set is considered gold or rare and is holofoil. We also now know that there are 66 cards in the set! A fair amount of the cards in this set are reprints of existing cards with new HiroQuest art designs. It was also noticed that where the location would be on a normal MetaZoo card, we now have factions. From the cards that we’ve seen so far we know that there are five factions. Astrals, which are alien-esque beasties. Astral consists of cards like Headless Horseman, Sewer Alligator, and Walking Sam. Taurobots are the robot beasties that we see in HiroQuest. Taurobots consist of beasties such as Wendigo, Hodag, and Loveland Frogman. Diasos are the mutant-like beastie variants. Diasos beasties consist of beasties such as Oklahoma Octopus, Sam Sinclair, and Dark Watchers. One of the very first teases we received for HiroQuest was of a Zombie Mothman. The Zombie faction is called Extants. Some notable Extants include Mothman, Iowa Dragon, and Uncle Sam! The last faction is the Oio. Oio faction beasties are pixelated or digital versions of beasties we know and love, such as Snipe, Unicorn, and UFO.
Several new cards are making an appearance in this set with many requiring that the caster be listening to a certain type of music to be able to contract the card. For example, Severed Limbs requires the caster to be listening to metal music to be able to contract the Spell. There is also an artifact called Windmanstätten Artifact states that if the caster hears white noise nearby, the page gains self-destruct. The artifact, when destroyed, allows dark and Cosmic beasties to gain poison(1) on their attacks until the end of the turn. We have a new card called Appetite For Flesh, which allows the caster to create new beastie zombie tokens every time a zombie you control destroys another beastie as long as the caster whispers “fresh meat”.There is a new artifact, Black Pullet Ring, which allows the caster to contract a dark artifact with an aura cost of 3 or less from the caster’s limbo. As of the time of this writing I haven’t seen the full set of cards. These are just some examples of what I’ve seen so far! Keep an eye out on MetaZoo HQ for a populated list of card images.
Needless to say, I am very excited to receive my HiroQuest CDs. I have 20 coming and just from seeing the HiroQuest cards that I’ve seen so far, I feel like 20 is not going to be enough! While many of these are reprints of existing cards that I can get in the core sets, the art here, in my opinion, is amazing. Despite some of the cards that require you to listen to a specific type of music to contract it, I do feel like some of the unique cards in HiroQuest are going to be useful in competitive play.