Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne reports on opening a Helvault and running a Yu-Gi-Oh! event the same day.

We opened two Helvaults this weekend and apparently Internet chitchat doesn't penetrate nearly as far as some Internet pundits postulate, as only one of our players had seen the lists and pictures of the Helvault contents.  Our players wound up pretty enthused about the opening of the Helvault, competing to see who could get seals opened first.  Of course, giving away a prize to the person who opened the first seal and the last seal likely had something to do with that.  The Spindown counters and double sided tokens went over well; the oversized cards, while collected avidly, did produce comments afterward about how they would have preferred to see the cards in a usable format.  I guess most of them would work as an oversized representation of your leader in a Commander tournament, but, aside from that, they just look cool.  We also had a number of players who wanted the Helvault itself, especially when they saw the pop-up Avacyn inside, so our two will grace the desktop or shelves of a couple of our local players.  We thought about keeping one for the store, but we have a limited amount of display space and a number of tournament players who really wanted the Helvault.

Running both the Avacyn Released pre-release and the Galactic Overlord Sneak Peek went more smoothly than I anticipated, with only minimal headaches caused by managing the player flow.  We seemed to have gotten the word out sufficiently so that bumping up the Yu-Gi-Oh! event from 1 p.m. to 10 a.m. only confused about three of our regular players and we wound up with about 20 people over the 4 hour period.  I still find it revealing that Konami would rather conflict with a TCG event rather than a comic event as Konami has said the company always plans to run a new Sneak Peek at the end of April or first of May and decided that, due to complaints last year, they would rather conflict with the WotC pre-release rather than Free Comic Book Day.  It still seems to me that, since game stores will more likely carry a wider selection and support Yu-Gi-Oh! than comic book stores would, that running the Galactic Overlord pre-release on Free Comic Book Day rather than on the Avacyn Restored pre-release day would inconvenience far fewer of their retail customers.

Of course, I have no access to Konami's figures, so they may indeed sell through comic stores more widely than game stores (and, based on the rough figures I have found, more dedicated comic shops exist than specialty game stores) and annoying the game stores rather than the comic shops may have proved the lesser of the proverbial two evils for Konami.  I can't really complain too much, both events went off well, even though it got a bit hectic as the Galactic Overlord event wound down and people started coming in for the Avacyn Restored pre-release.  Of course, we had respectable but not huge turnouts for each event and even had empty table space for the free pizza we fed our tournament players, so could manage the flow without too much difficulty.  I can only imagine the Order of Chaos suffered at stores that ran both events and hit much larger numbers than we did.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.