New Brooklyn Park Store Embraces Magic Trading Card Game Craze

At The Gathering Emporium, a new store in Brooklyn Park, you’ll get a chance to embrace your inner wizard. 

The store offers trading cards, tabletop games, and space for tournaments and casual gameplay.

Magic: The Gathering Craze

Many card shops specialize in one game or another. 

That’s true at The Gathering Emporium, which has a strong focus on Magic: The Gathering, one of the world’s most acclaimed trading card games.

The card game brought in a record-breaking $1.7 billion last year. That’s partly due to partnerships with other popular franchises like “The Lord of the Rings.”

“They are at the most popular they’ve ever been, and they’ve been a thing since 1993,” said Jacob Mayo, the store’s manager, of the trading card game.

It’s typically played in-person with players often relying on a local shop to meet new opponents.

“Sometimes going to the game store and meeting new faces, seeing new players, seeing new strategies and how people else play — that’s a huge thing because now I’m getting tested, now I’m playing my deck against something else, how am I going to get better?” Mayo said.

The Gathering Emporium, located at 8503 Wyoming Ave. N., wants to provide that meeting space for enthusiasts. They’ve got nearly a dozen tables to host nightly card games.

Another big draw is the cards they sell.

They’ve got cards for as cheap as a quarter or as expensive as $1,000.

“One of the other things is when people come in, I want them to be able to see plenty of cards, because selection is always what I want when I walk into a store,” Mayo said. “We’ll carry those 25-cent cards, those 50-cent cards, those 75-cent cards … we carry the really big stuff too. Like we’ve got the really specialty Rhystic Study, confetti foil, like $2,000. But not a lot of game stores are going to carry that kind of a card.”

At The Gathering Emporium, a new store in Brooklyn Park, you’ll get a chance to embrace your inner wizard.

Building Connections

While card collecting has its own appeal, the connection between two players is paramount, Mayo said.

“You get to hang out with your friends, and you also get to, kind of get that mental stimulation,” he said. “And in a world where all our stimulation kind of comes off of screens today, I think that’s a big part of why this is also exploding.”

Along with Magic, the store offers Warhammer and other specialized tabletop games. 

The Gathering Emporium will celebrate its grand opening on Saturday, July 11.

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