Inside the Wonders of the First Launch Party: Filming a Trading Card Game Designed by a Magic Veteran

Imagine you're a Magic: The Gathering kid growing up. You spend years staring at the art on those cards, learning the rhythm of the gameplay, memorizing the things you can do with the right combo. Then twenty-some years later you find yourself filming the launch event for a brand new trading card game — designed by Brian Tinsman, the same guy who built parts of first-edition Magic and helped design the American gameplay for first-edition Pokémon.

(Yeah. That Brian Tinsman. We tried to act normal about it.)

Wonders of the First is the new release from BlokPax — the same Columbia, SC company we filmed Bo Jackson Battle Arena content with. This is one of their flagship sets, the kind of game that's going to end up on shelves at Target and Walmart later this year. They asked us to come capture the launch party. We said yes immediately. (A bit selfishly, we might add.)

A Quick Note on the Game Itself

The premise involves a thing called The Shattering — the kind of cosmic backstory you'd want behind a fantasy card game. Stones get launched across the universe. Players collect them. There are seven rounds, give or take, and the magic of it (pun unavoidable) is that toward the end of a match you can go back and steal stones from earlier rounds depending on the cards you're holding. The strategy gets delicious late in the game.

It's the kind of design only somebody who has built world-class card games before would build. This one is freakin' awesome.

The Launch Party Was a Whole World

BlokPax didn't just throw a release party. They built one. The venue had a themed bar called The Phoenix, complete with specialty drinks designed for the release. The vibe was less "press event" and more "the pub in the universe you're about to enter." Walking in, you immediately understood the the intensity and the fierceness that folks are following this game. They came from all over the place to be there.

This was the first night that real fans — not just influencers — were getting their hands on packs. (There were influencers there. There were a lot of them. But there were also collectors who had been waiting for this drop for months.) Some people opened cards for six straight hours. From the time we picked up our first camera around 4 or 5 in the afternoon until well past midnight, the sound of card packs being torn open never really stopped.

The numbers on this kind of release are wild, by the way. Some attendees spent tens of thousands of dollars on cards at this event. We watched roughly fifteen "one of ones" get pulled — meaning, in the entire serialized series of cards, there's exactly one of each of those cards in existence, and somebody at this party now owns it. Every time one was pulled, the room rippled. We captured a few of those pulls.

https://vimeo.com/1069983336

How We Shot It

Event videography is its own discipline, and it's where our team started. The job isn't "shoot pretty pictures." The job is hunt the story. You're moving constantly. Your head is on a swivel all night. You're cataloging which corners are humming, which packs are about to be opened, which person is one card away from a moment. Sometimes the moment happens right in front of your lens. Sometimes you have thirty feet to cross before a one-of-one is pulled, and you sprint.

We ran the night with a small team — Kelly directing from a headset, plus two or three additional shooters (shoutout to David and Jami). When something major happened, Kelly would call it into our ears and whoever was closest would converge. For the truly big pulls, we'd sometimes ask the collector to redo the reveal so we could catch it cleanly, but that only happened maybe 2 times out of all the big pulls.

Why It Worked

The client loved it. No revisions, no rounds of "can we change this." Which is — for anyone in this business — the cleanest possible signal that the edit was good. We got to drink at the Phoenix Bar a little. We got to eat. We got to watch a Columbia-grown company launch something that's about to be in big-box stores nationwide. Everybody won, including the people who opened a one-of-one and the people who didn't.

(One small confession: we walked out of the event mildly jealous that we weren't opening any cards ourselves. We have some now. We've opened them. Nothing crazy. The hunt continues.)

If you've got an event — a launch, a release, a tournament, a one-night-only moment that needs to feel like the room it lived in — that's exactly the kind of work we love at Soda City Films. Drop us a line. #WondersOfTheFirst #BlockPacks #TradingCardGame #ColumbiaSC #SodaCityFilms #EventVideography #VideoProduction #BrianTinsman #SouthCarolina #BehindTheScenes #TCG