Today I am going to talk about a strange and unique experience I had this past week, and some of the specific things I've learned from it.

Early last Tuesday morning my favorite local game store, RIW Hobbies, caught fire and burned. It is believed that the fire started in the Shawarma carry-out place next door and spread through the wall into the hobby shop. The only good news about this unfortunate incident is that because it happened around three in the morning nobody was around to get hurt.

The owner, Pam, is a fantastic businesswoman and I have no doubt that she will have the new location up, running, and successful in the near future. The store was (and still is) planning on moving this week into a new, bigger location just down the street this week. It is one of those bad timing issues where you just have to ask, "Couldn't the fire have waited to burn down the strip mall just one more week until after the store was moved?"

One of the unfortunate characteristics of fire is that it doesn't act according to any kind of logical or emotional rhyme or reason. It's just fire and it does as it pleases.

I Think "Toast" Is an Accurate Description

I don't know how many of you have personally been involved in a house or business fire but this is the second big fire I've dealt with in the past three years. My parent's chimney had a defect that led to a small, contained wall fire a few years back. The scope of the damage from that fire was considerably less than the fire this last week but the damage was still horrific.

It isn't a matter of looking for things that did or didn't burn. In a house fire the soot, ash, and smoke gets on and into everything and is very difficult to get rid of. It's like when you go to a campfire and leave smelling like the campfire. Except in the case of a house fire the campfire is inside your house and is roughly 1000 times larger and smells much worse because you are not just burning clean, chopped wood but all sorts of different materials.

In addition to the property damage caused by the smoke there is also a ton of damage caused by the firefighters. I mean, they have to rip up the building to make sure that things are not on fire inside or underneath and they basically soak everything with water sprayed from the fire hoses.

No complaints about firefighters. The damage would have been absolute to the point where the strip mall would have burned into a sunken crater in the Earth if they hadn't have put it out. They do a tremendous job.

My point is that when you have a fire it isn't just a matter of what burned and what didn't burn. There are many different ways that things can get ruined. I'm sure that you can imagine how firemen spraying water in every direction from high power hoses would be really bad for a gigantic Magic collection...

When my parents had their fire it was mostly contained and pretty promptly put out by the fire department. The real damage was caused by the smoke that got into everything in the entire house and needed to be professionally cleaned up.

My first encounter with the RIW fire was very different.  It was what you would actually expect a a fire to look like.

When I walked into the store through the back door one of the first things that I noticed was that the ground was wet, mushy and covered in muddy ash and that the metal "exit" sign that hung above the back exit was basically melted into a metal blob. The wall that divided the game store from the carry-out place had been completely burned away in the middle and the ceiling had been completely ripped out with stray cords, wires, and fixtures hanging down everywhere.

It looked like the inside of the Ted CLAMP center at the end of Gremlins II except instead of green gremlin ooze everywhere it was grey ashy ooze everywhere.

The glass-half-full side of things was that because the store was planning on moving in a week anyway, there is a new location to actually move into and open. Having to search out and set up a new store from scratch would have been absolutely backbreaking. It is very lucky that the store has somewhere new to immediately move to and reopen.

Everything That Sells Burns

In the case of board games, table top mini games, sleeves, and other product it really isn't the end of the world. One can simply call their distributor and have new copies of those items delivered right to the new store. That stuff is fairly easy to replace.

The most difficult thing to replace is Magic inventory. I have handled and worked on their inventory for a decade and it was quite an immaculate collection of cards. The store had everything neatly organized and available for sale all of the time, one of the biggest advantages it had over other newer game stores. Do you need 45 weird EDH rares spanning every set ever? Basically, there is a 100% chance that the store has all of them in stock.

I compare an immaculate Magic inventory in a brick-and-mortar store to owning a money tree. You've spent ten years growing it slowly over time, acquiring collections and buying or bulking up on cards when they are low in value. Now you literally just have 20 copies of every card. As we all know, Magic cards tend to appreciate over time so the value of the collection continues to generate value by being salable goods but also continues to accrue value.

Losing one's entire Magic inventory (even if it is insured) is a pretty devastating loss to a game shop. It isn't like a business can simply call up ACD Distribution and say "Hey, we need eight of every Magic single to restock our inventory."

ACD is insanely awesome but not even they can accomplish that task. It again becomes a job of rebuilding inventory through buying singles and collections from square one.

Saving What Can Be Saved

I've spent the past week along with the rest of the RIW crew basically sifting through the rubble to salvage whatever can be salvaged in hopes of having a nice "The Literal Fire Sale" when the store reopens. Or, at least finding the items that are in good enough condition that they don't need to be a "total loss."

Smokey-smelling or water-damaged Underground Sea or Tarmogoyf definitely have a value greater than zero.

I have learned quite a few things about Magic cards in the context of a fire this past week that I'd like to pass along to everybody. Some of these tips are probably worth doing no matter what because they are 100% value.

The store keeps its case cards in four column boxes on the back counter and each card is sleeved with a perfect fit sleeve. When the firefighters were spraying water around in the store very few of those cards got "direct hit" by hoses and ruined, but the cards that were sleeved from the top (so that the opening is at the bottom) fared much better than the ones that were sleeved the other way.

Water and mist in the air, as it settled, got into the sleeves on the ones where the opening was facing up. Also, the smokey smell got into the cards that were sleeved from the bottom much more densely. So, if you have cards that are sitting and sleeved I would heavily recommend sleeving them so that the bottom is exposed rather than the top. The same goes for cards that were sleeved and in binders.

One of the processes we used to salvage Magic product that wasn't actually destroyed was to open things until they were not smokey anymore. Yesterday, Mark Herberholtz came out to the store and he and I went through more Magic product than I could even quantify.

We'd look at a sealed case of Magic booster boxes. We'd smell the cardboard case, "does it smell like smoke?" Yes. So we'd crack the case and smell the boxes wrapped in plastic. "Does the plastic smell like smoke?" Yes. So, we'd take the plastic off and smell the cardboard. "does the cardboard booster box smell like smoke?" Yes. So, we'd pull the packs out of the box and smell the actual packs. "Do the foil booster packs smell like smoke?" Yes. So, then we'd just crack the packs.

The interesting thing is that while the smoke could penetrate through a cardboard box, through plastic wrap, through another cardboard box and onto the foil booster packs it never made it through the foil booster pack wrapper. Which is pretty lucky. In fact, even the exposed booster packs that were sitting on the shelves and reeked of smoke had cards inside that didn't smell smokey.

While the booster pack casings may have been awesome at keeping out smoke it was not so awesome against the elemental force of water... Which is one of the reasons we decided to crack so many packs yesterday.

I don't even know how it is possible (I actually do know because I took science classes but I simply refuse to believe it is true because it is so weird) that a booster box completely sealed with plastic shrink wrap with the cards wrapped with foil wrapping can be full of cards that are soaking wet. That should give you some indication of how much water the fire department was spraying around in there!

I realize that cracking packs is not value (especially for old sets like Urza's Saga, Tempest, etc.) but when the actually packaging is damaged and it is unclear if the cards inside are damaged it just sort of made sense. Not to mention that the store needed to rebuild its entire inventory so every single card opened (regardless of whether it is a bulk rare or not) is going to be used.

So, needless to say we opened a lot of packs.

More Reasons to Hate Modern Masters

We had so many boxes of Modern Masters get ruined in the fire it's unbelievable. The awkward thing was that if it had been any other set we would have been fine. Specifically, the new cardboard packaging caused a lot of problems with regard to the water and dampness of the fire.

You see, when the cases of MM2 got wet the water absorbed into everything including the cardboard booster pack packaging. Typically with packaging the cardboard booster box would hold and absorb more of the moisture and it would be harder for the water to get to the actual cards, since the foil booster packaging doesn't actually hold moisture very well.

However, with cardboard booster packaging the actual booster packs absorb water and get damp, which damages the cards inside much more easily than a foil package.

If MM2 had foil wrappers like every other set our booster packs would probably have been completely fine. However, the cardboard packaging caused a ton of problems. Even booster boxes that didn't look like they had any damage or smoke smell inside had damaged packs and cards from absorbing water. We also observed that tons of our foils were badly warped.

Anybody who bought Modern Masters 2015 and is investing on those boxes should mind this fact. Make sure that you don't store your packs anywhere that is damp because not having the foil booster wrapper to protect the cards will damage the cards right in the pack! How dumb. As if there weren't enough reasons already to be annoyed with Modern Masters 2015.

The MM2 Cards were ruined in the pack at a way higher rate than anything else and they weren't even close to having taken the worst beating with regard to water exposure. MM2 cards in a sealed case were in worse condition when cracked than foil packs that were literally sitting exposed on the shelf.

Do not store MM2 sealed product in your damp basement. The cards and packs inside will be ruined.

Without a doubt I would store my Magic cards in an airtight or plastic tupperware container of some sort. I actually went out and bought a couple of big airtight plastic bins to store my personal collection in.

The only cards in the entire store that didn't get damaged at all were a bunch of binders and boxes that were being stored inside of airtight plastic containers. These are impervious to water and smoke so it just makes sense to store valuable cards inside of them instead of just sitting in cardboard boxes on a shelf.

You never think that you will be the victim of a fire until it happens to you. It can happen to anyone. It is a miserable experience. Everything is ashy and stinky and disgusting. It is ugly to look at all of the nice things that you had damaged and undesirable.

In the end I'm just glad that everybody is fine and nobody got hurt. I'm excited that the store will be moving and reopening in the next week or so and that life will go on.