Posted on by — Leave a comment

17 Days to Go: The Blissful Eternity Midnight Prerelease Is Coming!

We are officially 17 days away from the Blissful Eternity Midnight Prerelease! It’s time to stop wondering and start preparing. Are you ready to try your luck and chase that ultra-rare, Tetsuya Nomura-illustrated Sephiroth Gold Stamped Signature card?

Here is everything you need to know to join the Kardboard Korner crew for our favorite community tradition.

📍 Where Are We Meeting?

While we primarily operate as an online shop, we love bringing the local community together. We’ll be hosting after-hours at our usual haunt:

🏠 Mr. Gyros 📌 9229 S. Cicero Ave, Oak Lawn, IL 60453

⏰ When is the Kickoff?

🗓️ Friday, July 31st, 2026 The main tournament event starts exactly at Midnight, but the doors open early at 9:00 PM.

  • Early Birds: Come hang out for some casual play, trading, or just grabbing some food.

  • New Players: If you’ve never played FFTCG, show up early! We’ll be running demos and teaching the basics before the tournament officially kicks off.

🏆 How Do I Win?

We’ve been hosting these since Opus XIV, and we like to make sure everyone leaves happy:

  • The Grand Prize: Secure 1st place and you’ll walk away with an extra Blissful Eternity Prerelease Kit!

  • Top 4: We’ve got dedicated prize support locked in for our top finishers.

  • The “Everyone Wins” Rule: Even if the packs aren’t in your favor, everyone who participates walks away with at least one free booster pack.

💰 Entry & Kits

  • Tournament Entry: $50.00 (Includes your first Prerelease Kit containing 9 booster packs, an exclusive promo, and sleeves).

  • Additional Kits: $45.00 each for those looking to stock up on the night.

Why Attend?

Aside from being among the absolute first to crack open Blissful Eternity and hunt for those stunning new Noir cards like Cloud, it’s all about the atmosphere. There’s something genuinely special about grinding through a tournament until 3:00 AM with a group of people who love this game just as much as you do.

Are you planning on coming out? Drop a comment below so we can get an accurate head count, or let us know which card you’re hunting for most in this set!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Terra Luck, Cleat Fails, & Windows 11 Breakthroughs

What a week! I finally found a sliver of free time to actually play some Final Fantasy TCG instead of just sorting it. I packed up my Moogle Bounty Mayhem deck and headed over to Game Knight in Summit to check out the setup my buddy Leo has going on.

Most of the usual FFTCG crew was there, and honestly, it was an absolute blast. As for how I actually did? Let’s just say my Moogle Bounty Mayhem didn’t quite break the meta this time, and I walked away with a few losses. But hey, I’ve never claimed to be a world-champion player, and I don’t get to play nearly as much as I’d like to—so I’m strictly blaming it on rust!

The Golden Touch 🃏✨

The real highlight of the night came after the games. I grabbed my Journey of Discovery consolation pack and handed it right over to my daughter, who came along for the ride. She has notorious good luck, so I told Leo right then and there: “She’s pulling the Terra.”

Sure enough, she rips open the pack, and right there on top is Terra! It wasn’t the massive Gold Signature version, but pulling the clean Foil version right on cue gave us a great laugh. We jammed one more casual game and headed home happy.

🚨 Countdown to Midnight: Blissful Eternity Prerelease!

The countdown is officially on! We are just 25 days away from the Blissful Eternity Midnight Prerelease on Friday, July 31st.

We will be dropping a dedicated blog post with every single detail tomorrow, but here is the quick rundown of what you need to know:

  • 9:00 PM: Doors open for casual games, trading, or just hanging out.

  • Midnight (12:00 AM): Pre-release kits hit the tables and the tournament kicks off!

  • The Prizing: Winner takes home a full kit, and absolutely nobody walks away empty-handed.

Hanging Up the Cleats (That I Never Had) ⚽🤕

Outside of the card shop, soccer season is officially spinning up—and I’m coaching the little ones this year!

I took the kids down to the local field down the street for practice, and in a momentary lapse of reason, I decided to show off a bit. I tried to pull off a slick Rabona kick, completely miscalculated, kicked the heel of my own standing foot, and went down hard. Naturally, because I never learn my lesson, I got right back up to try it one more time and promptly tripped right over the ball.

I guess it’s finally time to admit I’m not young anymore and hang up my cleats… which is easy, considering I never actually owned soccer cleats in the first place. And, that means that I can’t hang them up. I’ll be still out there playing.

In Other News… 🖥️

I am slowly but surely making peace with Windows 11. There are definitely still some features that drive me crazy, but I’ve managed to find a few solid workarounds for my documents and layouts. If you’re struggling with the update too, hang in there—there is light at the end of the tunnel!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What a weekend we just had!

While everyone else was out enjoying the 4th of July, we were dealing with a different kind of fireworks—tech problems. Once again, an SSL malfunction reared its ugly head, and we spent the holiday weekend trying to get it sorted out. From the looks of it, everything is finally back to normal and the site is stable. It is always incredibly frustrating when your website goes down out of the blue, especially when you are actively trying to prep the shop for a major set release.

Speaking of which, the Blissful Eternity Midnight Prerelease is right around the Korner! We are officially 25 days away from Friday, July 31st. We will be dropping more specific venue details later this week, but if you’ve already been to one of our midnight events, you already know what kind of hype is in store.

The Great Windows 11 Document Headache 🖥️

In other tech news, I finally got a new work computer, and I’ve gotta say: I am absolutely not liking Windows 11 right now.

The biggest issue? They completely stripped away native support for Rich Text Documents (.rtf). Since the vast majority of our operational files, lists, and templates were built using Rich Text, it’s created a massive headache. Now, I have to go through the painstaking process of converting all those old files into simple text documents or finding a workaround just to access our data. If you’ve got a smooth trick for handling this transition, my inbox is wide open.

Lorcana Flash Sale (And How We Got It) 🧚

If you’ve been keeping an eye on our TCGPlayer store over the last few days, you might have noticed some Disney Lorcana singles hitting the shelves. Well, blink and you missed them, because they have been absolutely flying out the door. We had one massive batch of listings that completely sold out before morning!

Does this mean Kardboard Korner is officially breaking into Lorcana? Probably not. We aren’t planning to stock it regularly, but I definitely won’t second-guess buying a collection next time someone brings one to the table. We actually almost turned this specific batch down entirely, but it was bundled into a much larger, high-value Final Fantasy TCG collection that we just couldn’t pass up. Our loss is your gain, and the local Lorcana community wasted no time clearing it out!

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Post-Storm Update: We Are Back & The Restock Quest Continues!

What a week we just had! Storm season finally caught up with us, and it did a real number on our operations. Usually, a blackout around here only lasts a couple of hours, but this storm was a completely different beast.

We were left entirely in the dark for a few days. To make things even more interesting, when the power finally did kick back on, only half of our electricity worked—which meant our internet was dead for another full day.

While my wife and kids managed to escape the outage and head out of town to a nice resort, I stayed behind to hold down the fort and keep things moving as best I could. Of course, the exact day we would have been leaving was the day the power finally clicked back on at the restaurant. That meant an immediate mountain of work: inspecting the inventory, throwing out what didn’t survive, and grinding hard to get everything prepped and ready to open the doors again.

Back on the Restock Quest 🃏

Before the weather decided to interfere, we were absolutely flying through our card inventory. We officially wrapped up Opus V and are sitting right at the finish line for Opus VI. We honestly would have been completely done with Opus VI by now, but that’s right when the storm struck and pulled the plug!

Shipping Update 📦

If you currently have a pending order with us, thank you so much for your patience. Now that our lights, internet, and computers are fully operational again, we are working around the clock to pack, tag, and ship every single order out A.S.A.P.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Stocking the Shelves: Massive Single Restock is Live!

We’re just going to drop this little announcement right here. We are officially in the zone and actively stocking singles directly onto the website right now. What does that mean for you? More Full Arts for you to get your hands on.

We are digging deep through the vaults for this one—we’re finding everything from Opus IX all the way up to Dreamlike Oceans, and absolutely everything in between. And yes, for everyone asking, that even includes the highly sought-after Legacy Reprints.

Oh, and Promos? Let’s not forget the Promos. We’ve got a sweet stack of them hitting the inventory list today as well.

So, if there is a specific card you’ve been hunting for to finish off your latest deck or polish up your binder collection, now is the time to jump on it. Go lock it down before it heads out the door to someone else who snagged it right out from under your nose!

Are you hunting down any specific Full Arts from the older sets today, or are you strictly focused on cleaning out the remaining Dreamlike Oceans stock?