As we close our Benton location and look to the future, we wanted to give you, our customers, a glimpse at what is coming down the pipeline for XP!

Familiar Faces

Our Benton staff will be rejoining us at our Shreveport location. Kevin and Jacob are experienced and valuable members of the XP team, and will be bringing their knowledge and experience back to home base as we continue to improve our customer service offerings.

Web Sales Expansion

We will be increasing what is available for online purchase from us! By now, you know that you can preorder the newest set of your favorite trading card game or the hottest singles for your new deck from the comfort of your couch. We’re working on increasing our online inventory to make shopping for the latest TCGs and accessories as convenient as possible – let us know what you’d like to see!

The Revitalization of Standard

Wizards of the Coast has been steadily increasing their support for the Standard format over the last year. It started with moving all Store Championships to Standard and introducing Standard Showdowns – and has continued with increased Standard RCQs, the extension of rotation to 3 years instead of 1, Foundations not rotating for 5 years, and now the addition of Universes Beyond to the format - bringing in 2 more Standard sets every year!

We want to do our part to help Standard thrive. While we already have free Release Drafts for each set and free Standard Showdowns every Saturday, we felt that there was more we could do.

Starting with Foundations, we’re adding a new event to our rotation: Set Constructed. This event will take place the Friday AFTER Release Draft and will be FREE if you participated in the Release Day Draft (otherwise, it’s a $10 event). This means that you can play in for any Prerelease Event on November 8th or 9th and get a Free Release Draft pass, then show up on November 15th to get a Free Set Constructed pass for November 22nd. The best part is, you can use your Prerelease and Draft cards to build your deck for the event – and even use it to play in our free Standard Showdown event afterwards!

To add on to that: starting in December, Standard Showdown will be moving to a regular $10 event instead of a free event. This allows us to offer more prizing to our Standard community. However, the first Standard Showdown after a Set Constructed event will still always be a free event – just with more prizing!

But that’s not all we’re doing. We are also raising our trade-in rates for any Standard legal singles! We’re doubling our rate for bulk rares (from $0.10 to $0.20 per card), increasing the rate for bulk commons and uncommons to $5 per 1k, and offering 70% in Store Credit for all cards over $4. This change is to help make sure that we always have the hottest new singles in stock!

Website Upgrades

Very soon, you’ll see the Gamers XP website get a sleek new look. We’re making changes to almost every aspect of the site to improve usability, function, and the way we share information with our community. The first thing we’re doing is upgrading the members area to include special deals and discounts for our most loyal customers. We’re upgrading our Homepage and event areas to make sure that all of the most relevant information for you and your favorite games is only a click away. We can’t wait to share these changes with you soon!

Dungeons and Dragons – Campaign 5

With the new 2024 rules for Dungeons and Dragons 2/3rds of the way here, it’s time to talk about what else is coming to our D&D Community – the newest Store Campaign! This campaign will be the first to use the new ruleset, and will feature a ton of changes to the way we do campaigns at the store. Session Zero is scheduled for January 27th – this free community event is the best place to get the inside scoop on the store campaign and to meet up with our thriving Dungeons and Dragons community. We hope to see you there!

Community Champions

Our most exciting update – the Champion Program. This will be a way for us to highlight those people in our communities who are as dedicated to the game as we are. Our ideal Champions will be active in their community, welcoming and helpful to new players, and hands-on with events and special offerings for their respective games. These individuals will be nominated by the community and receive recognition in-store, as well as special gifts and rewards throughout the time they are a Champion with us. This program should be rolling out in early 2025!

We are so excited to take you along with us through the next chapter of Gamers XP’s future. The ride so far has been fantastic, and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store.