So this is a little late getting to this review but last weekend was a lot and so I have a lot to post about and it’s hard to marathon these posts and get them out quickly with my schedule, but here we are. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before David Lodge is an actor I am a huge fan of and his first convention was last weekend at an event five hours from home. Naturally, I leaped at the chance to meet him and this is how I went to my first ever trading card convention.

Vendors:

I used to be big into collectible card games and so this kind of brought out the kid in me that was so passionate about collecting them. Cards were everywhere. While all kinds of cards were present such as baseball cards, Yugioh cards, and original card games, the most common cards found at this event were Pokemon cards. So many in fact I think you could call this event a pseudo-Pokemon convention. This is such a perfect event for the card collector because the variety of cards here was just vast. I even got a random pack of Pokemon cards thrown at me, which I will explain in more detail later. Now I will also say this if you have no interest in shopping for cards of any kind then good chance the vendors will not interest you because this made up an overwhelming majority of the merch for sale with some other items mixed in various areas like funkos and artwork.

Guests:

The guest list was really interesting. Of course, I was excited about David Lodge but the roster of guests included a fun variety of entertainers from shows like Power Rangers, Pokemon, Yugioh, Attack on Titan, and some well-known content creators. I went VIP which has its own autograph line which saved me quite a bit of time in meeting the actors I wanted to see, but at no point were any of the lines massive enough that I felt like it would be difficult to meet anyone. The guest list also included some singers like Jason Paige, singer for the original Pokemon theme, and Vanilla Ice. Paige was going to sing the theme on Saturday but his flight was delayed and the concert had to be canceled. Now, this was disappointing as I was really hoping to see that, but these things do happen and as compensation for the fans who showed up the convention threw out free packs of Pokemon cards which I thought was nice. Most conventions really don’t do anything in these situations so I was shocked and impressed.

The Vanilla Ice concert was actually a lot of fun. Where I got VIP access to it I was really close to the front as my wife and I watched him perform with the Ninja Turtles, yes you read that right. Vanilla Ice loves to showboat a bit in his shows which is a lot of fun and he sprayed people with water from water bottles and threw the bottles out into the crowd. Now for the funny story. Me being a genius I watched the first bottle thinking it wouldn’t hit me two seconds before being whacked in the face with it. Then I was swarmed with fans going for the bottle and I just gave them space. It was such a fun show and a very memorable experience.

Panels:

I didn’t see a single panel, honestly. I went to this convention on Saturday and another on Sunday and the panels were oddly Sunday only. I thought it was weird that the panels were exclusive to one day but truth be told there weren’t many of them anyway just a handful of group panels with the guests. While the panels were likely interesting it’s very clear that they are more of an afterthought to this event.

Overall this is a dream come true for the card collector as cards are everywhere here and all kinds can be found especially if you collect Pokemon cards. The lines were not bad at all and the guest list was a lot of fun. The event included concerts and while one was canceled the one I was able to go to was exciting. Where I’m not big into card collecting this is probably an event that I’ll only go to if the guests attract my attention but I’m sure if I saw this at the height of my card collecting days then I would attend this event as much as possible.