THE OH MY BLOG
Dear reader,
Many of you already know how much I enjoy writing long posts, even if it’s just about a price of a new product (sorry, not sorry). If you didn’t know, you’ve been warned. 😉
Get ready for some tough love! I firmly believe in straightforward communication with players on how we feel about running a game store. It is logical to be honest. So I reserve the right to talk out of my backside, without a filter on occasion, so don’t be surprised if some ramblings are incoherent and/or might strike a nerve. Do not continue reading if you can’t handle the(my) truth, odds are that all our players can reflect on the below rants of an old, calm, cool and collected man (42 is Ghalta-level compared to the average age of our players). As a tournament organizer, we have a responsibility to make it clear to players how our world works so that you, the players, can better understand us as a business.
Running an LGS is no stroll in the park on a pink pony. No offense to pink ponies. Now that I think of it, I like pink and ponies. I also digress. Where was I? Oh yes! Because that’s what we are, a business, not a charity. Even though we genuinely do care for the players and their hobbies, before that we need to make sure the lights stay on. We have a much larger picture to think of; store does well = we can give more back to the players. Sometimes that means that tough decisions must be made, like banning a players or raising the prices even though a few will not understand. Personally, I distaste conflict, but hear me when I say I will defend this community and business with my life. Bad apples will be rooted from the ground and discarded without a moments thought if it’s for the good of the majority and to ”uphold the peace”, so to speak. I mean the staff and I are gamers as well, we know how it feels to have limited resources like time and money. We are also imperfect beings that crave games and escapism once in a while. We’re right there with you.
Anyone that reads these texts will have a much better understanding of why and how things are done under our roof. Or they will never visit us again. But things need to be said. We also have a ton of new players that have never played in-store and this blog has a lot of new insight to offer for those individuals. Some veteran players will need to read up on these as well to freshen their memory on, I don’t know, for instance how to conduct themselves at tournaments, at local game stores, etc.
Hopefully, for your sake, I will not be the only author here. Ideally we will receive some player experiences that we put in here as well, but I do apologize in advance for my own poor grammar and undiagnosed dyslexia. I promise that I will try to find time to let off steam for your pleasure from time to time. But the hope is to present more player written meta-breakdowns, miniature game battle reports, product reviews and so on.
Welcome to the wondrous rabbit hole of OMG, where we maybe try explain how the cookie crumbles!
Peace & love <3
– Supi
OH MY online store!
You people are amazing! Thank you to our dear players for making this happen! From a tiny 50m2 store on the 3rd floor of Myyrmanni, to an 80m2 store on the same floor, to our current 200m2 Myyrmäentie 4 location, currently looking for a ~500-750m2 space and now opening an online store. We have been blessed with an awesome couple-thousand-strong-player-base that we’re honored to call our extended family. We achieved this together and can now reach even more players thanks to you!
This new site is at a beta-phase, soft-launch if you will, so bear with us whilst we find our sea legs in this vast ocean of new things to learn. Opening discounts and new products coming in hot! We will begin selling only within Finland to get a feel for things. To our fans abroad, fret not, you’re not forgotten and your time will come. Thank you for your patience and support.
Everyone needs to make a new account! If you have credits with us, they will be added manually when you let us know that you are about to make a purchase and need them added to your account. you can of course still use them at the store as well. Just let us know your email at the register. We ask that all customers read our rules before making purchases and sending us feedback. A loyalty program is in the works. 😉
For twelve years you’ve asked ”How can I support OMG from out of town?” Well, now you can. The site isn’t ready and will always be an ever evolving project. Please use the feedback form below and do not hesitate sending us constructive feedback, because we must’ve missed a ton of stuff! We don’t promise to answer, but we do promise to read each and everyone of them.
We will gradually roll out more products, in addition to the presale items of course. We may not have much in stock in the beginning, but with your help, over time we will increase the variety and amount of products. We have upcoming relevant products coming in soon for preorders. There’s just one or two of us doing the online orders and updating the site, but we will do our utmost so that this doesn’t affect the day-to-day events. If all goes to plan, I will probably be alone behind the register for some time. So please buy so we can afford a fourth employee. <3
There are so many to thank for carrying us to this moment. Many thanks to my silent business partners and friends. To the incredible Huikka for setting us up. My parents & lil’ bro! <3 And everyone else that helped in the beginning. Without any of you I couldn’t have begun this frightening yet exciting journey. Back then I was totally broke and clueless (still am), but you believed in me and the idea of a community-focused LGS. You know who you are and I’m forever grateful to you. Cheers to all our sponsors as well!
Also my utmost gratitude and awe to our ever-so-trusty Ville Nuutinen from Wunderdog for developing and running our old website totally pro bono for about a decade! We needed a calendar for events and preregistering, he delivered. Since we’ve focused on event organizing, the end result was the backbone of our company. It has been fantastic to work with you for all these years, Ville. Thank you buddy for answering my messages at a moments notice (sorry!), for helping us grow our business and community to what it is now.
A huge thanks to my trusty duo, Toffe and Eetu! <3 As well as all our other community managers, judges and sponsors! You’re all very precious and we could not have made it this far without you. Nähdään pikkujouluissa! 😉
The online store as an idea has been brewing for a very long time. Many of you know our history and might remember that we’ve had a couple of attempts at this, only for them to be thwarted by unforeseen setbacks. We’re very proud to be up and running after twelve years, through thick and thin with the players. As a business without an online store, Covid made things ”interesting” to say the least. I felt so hopeless, but the players just kept on supporting us to keep us alive. It also helped that our landlord gave us a couple rent-free months during the pandemic (kiitos Harri)! Many of you even mentioned as you bought items, that you didn’t need anything, but wanted your LGS to exist after the dust had settled. It worked. Thank you to each and every player that has ever visited us! <3
It was within those trying times that I had the privileged of getting to know a fantastic person. The legendary MTG 2018 Grand Prix Prague champion, Lauri Pispa from Tampere. He had his own online store and we just said ”screw it, let’s team up and merge Sensei’s Divining Shop and OMG into one”. Oh did we have big plans for you peeps. Sadly the merge didn’t follow through due to a very serious force majeure, but everything is fine now thankfully. I will always cherish the teachings of my sensei. Thank you Lauri and I hope we make you proud. All the best to you and yours!
To quote one of my faves, I did it my way. But it’s really not rocket science; be authentic, don’t do it for the money, treat players as you would like to be treated, set a service- and establishment- quality standard so high that even you will have a hard time upholding it, and the players will thank you. We need more LGSs in Finland that have a gaming area and I’m soooo glad we’ve seen that happen recently. It’s hard work, but totally worth it. So thank you to those brave stores have chosen this path!
High quality is key. Our mandate was, and still is, to present players affordable products and make event organizing a priority. A testament to maintaining that high quality and standards came from all the way from the US. Our tiny but thriving gaming community received recognition for our tireless efforts; the TCG giant, Wizards of the Coast dubbed us as the first ever Premium WPN Store in the Nordics. Joe, Jerome, Carla, Luke, Omar and the whole WotC team were a stellar bunch of people! I remember getting the Premium confirmation call from WotC, knees buckled and something went in my eye. This was a huge turning point for us as a small business, in tiny Myyrmäki. Hard work pays off and size doesn’t matter. ”Premium WPN” meant more product allocations (no, they don’t just sell you as much as you can afford, they actually care how many players revisit your store), better retail service and awesome prizes like our OMG-name stamped on official cards. We even put Vantaa/Finland on Magic cards because why not! The overall credibility of the company went up like crazy and we thank WotC and their reps for being a crucial part in our success.
Back then I was the only staff member but we’ve employed three people after that. Currently there’s two staff members in addition to myself. That was on my bucket list, to actually employ another person. Thank you to Paisti for helping out at a very important moment in my personal life as well as the companies. It didn’t last, but it was really great to work with you my friend. I will never forget how you helped my family and the store during those hard times.
Then like a lottery win, this ”random” French dude approached the register and told me that he’s available if we were hiring. I knew this monsieur as a colleague from another game store and his reputation was solid. Solid gold that is. For years players had told me of this nice guy that was well versed in the art of Magic. Hiring him was maybe one of the easiest decisions of my life as he had almost a decade of LGS experience under his belt, in addition to being an MTG judge and I desperately needed to share the work load. What an absolute powerhouse of a man you are, Quentin! You don’t give yourself enough credit. Super-funny dude as well! 😀 He was initially hired to run our Cardmarket stuff (soon™), but with the ever increasing event and thus player amounts, we very quickly realized the store needed two staff members to run smoothly. He’s excellent with our players, very well liked, so it felt wrong to force the single card sales thing at that point and we actually needed more staff on at the register.
Then one day came an entrepreneur buddy of mine to pick up some empty palettes, Ile. I was complaining to him how I get flooded with messages wondering why we don’t have an online store, but I don’t have time to put it up and wouldn’t know where to start (tech and I were not meant to be). Ile said he’s actually unemployed of his own choosing. His previous work; almost a decade of running his own paint business that was online as well as brick-and-mortar. He has extensive knowledge of running online stores and many of the tools we chose for ourselves derive from his past experiences. He was hired almost instantly since we were barely keeping up with the workload with Quentin and I needed someone I knew I could trust to carry more weight. So another lottery win for Team OMG! We planned for him to put up our online store in about 3 months…and fastforward to today, after a year of integration-hiccups, fine tuning and a lot of time and money, the site is presentable! I have to say most of the delays were because of the positive problem of our store being so full of players on a daily basis, that we just were struggling to find time to do everything we wanted. It has been an insanely busy year with so many new players finding us, but Quentin and Ile, you guys never gave up. You two are amazing and I am honored to work alongside both of you and I enjoy your company a lot. Much gratitude, guys. Not all heroes wear capes!
And hats off to Sininen Härkä for putting up our new site. We definitely weren’t an easy customer. Good job to the whole team and we look forward to working with you even more!
Last but never ever the least. To my wife, two children and two cats, I love you so much. Thank you for all the support and the sacrifices you’ve made over the years so that I can work late nights 5-7 days a week, ~12h/day. Hopefully we can spend more time together soon. I desperately need to see my kids grow up and that means this online store needs to work so that I don’t have to choose between the two. I’ve given over a quarter of my life to the OMG-fam and our kids only know a dad that works a lot and super late. I know many players can relate. I don’t judge my players when they reproduce and we don’t see them for years or at all anymore, so maybe I have earned to spend time with my family as well. I miss them every day to the point that it hurts. Of course hearing players laugh and seeing them smile everyday helps tremendously, but I think some players don’t know that I have other priorities as well. <3
It has been a mutually beneficial and wondrous adventure with all of you and now with the online store we can start distributing that genuine feeling of togetherness to a wider audience. If you are new to us, I sincerely hope we meet one day.
With that being said, a warm welcome to our online store. Peace & love!
- Supi
dog-friendly store
As I write this, I have a Finnish Lapphund warming my feet, Siri. We love animals. I’ve lived with cats, parrots, iguanas and hopefully one day, a dog. We currently have a mom-daughter Siberian cat-combo at home, Kiora and Isperia.
Dogs are always welcome at OMG one at a time if they are well trained and can cope inside a very busy game store with sometimes almost 100 people at once and a lot of noise. If the dog has history of biting and/or barking, absolutely refrain from bringing them here. OMG is not a testing ground for your dog at the expense of others who’ve paid to be there. You are responsible for your dogs actions, so keep that in mind at all times. Also, if even one player lets us know of dog allergies or phobias, the owner and dog must leave without a possible refund if they were in an event. There’s a drinking bowl available, just ask the staff for it.
With that being said, we’ve met tens of wonderfully trained dogs over the years. We’d love to keep it that way. <3
- Supi
PREREGISTERING
Please, please, PLEASE preregister to the events well in advance and remember to remove your name if you can’t make it. Not just for our sake, but yours even more so. You get better service when we are better prepared. Pick up a calendar and put the events in there to remind yourself of YOUR hobby that needs other players for it to be played. Learn the time and don’t take the last possible bus/train if you can take the earlier ones.
Pro-tip: some events have been taken off our calendar over the years due to them not launching. Plan ahead to avoid your game getting canceled. Most have invested hundreds and hundreds of euros into their gaming pieces. Thousands of euros in many cases. My job is to tell you that it’s not sensible to invest that much into something you’re not willing to make time for. I don’t want to hear of anyone making hasty purchases, only to realize they had just one of the holy duality of gaming: money, but no time. Be brave and take responsibility of your own doings. Your actions should never hurt the community as a whole, be aware of others. Please remember that.
The events in our online store are coded as products, but we will not implement a prepayment on weeklies. At least not yet. But we will if it helps us do our job better and when that happens there’s no money back guarantee for those tickets, just like a concert ticket. Some events on the weekends, like Nationals and Blood Bowl tournaments, might see a prepayment option.
It is crucial for us to know how many players are coming in on any given day. There are multiple reasons for the importance of this:
- If we don’t know you are coming, your seat will be made available for other games. Trust me, do not presume you can waltz in and just sit down to play. Yes, imagine that, your game is not the only one played. As I write this, there are 13 different Organized Play TCGs that we run, but only 7 days in a week, of which we try to rest on Sundays, except Toffe, he’s built different. Then there are the plethora of other games we organize, like five or ten miniature games and campaigns for them, RPG’s, etc.
- With limited seating, and very limited time before we open, we physically have to juggle the tables and chairs before we open to accommodate the amount of preregged players we see at that moment. Then we have to keep juggling them throughout the day to cater to the late registrations/cancellations. I have chronic pain due to herniated discs (to name one disability), so that sort of work will be done by our other staff members and I’n super thankful for them to do those chores. But trust me when I say it’s really not nice for them either.
- We usually print out the player lists for all the games before we open. Any extra confusion at the register just before our events start will hinder our performance as tournament organizers and lessen the value and experience for all the participants for that day. And they pay good money for being there. Even one player that’s like ”oh I signed up just before I walked in” or my absolute favorite: ”oh I just forgot” delays the launch of events since we have to ask for your name, check if we have space (see table & chair juggling above) and then communicate to everyone behind you in the line why we are leaving the register (to arrange tables and make sure we can accommodate). We get these cases not one per day, but even ten sometimes for all the games and almost exactly at the same time since most of our events start around 17:00-17:30 (yes that’s around when people are free from work/school). Or would you prefer to have a cut-off time for preregistering like some stores do? We have calculated that if we would do that or demand a nonrefundable prepayment for entry fees, it would decrease the amount of players so drastically that we would probably just have to close shop. So please try not to be that person who ”just forgets”.
- Supi