Going to Comic-Con in San Diego is a commitment. It’s not just the travel, the hotels, the Lyfts and Ubers, the food, and the drinks (…oh so many drinks), it’s much more. The floor of SDCC is the ultimate test of maintaining your composure and measuring your self-restraint.

And many, if not all of us, fail. New vinyl collectibles, classic non-sports trading cards, prints, sketches, autographed memorabilia, comics, nostalgia filled unpackaged toys, trades, meet & greets are just the start of the ways that your wallet can bottom out within just a few hours if you aren’t careful.

I, like many, try to go down with a plan on what I will be purchasing. As a Comic-Con veteran of nine SDCC’s (eight of them being consecutive), what I look for in advance is the list of the exclusives. This gives a good baseline for what will most likely be purchased.

Con Season 2016 has begun! With everything from PAX East this upcoming weekend all the way to Comikaze in October, the best half of the year is underway. In an effort to best cover these, The Flickcast has made sure I have appropriate credentials to get on the floor (or at the least, a map of where all the best bars and parties are) at each convention.

First, I headed to WonderCon as a part of The Flickcast team and Whiskey & Waffles. At the event, I had four very important ‘jobs’:

1. Speak on the SKYBOUND panel about digital video creators

2. Take the Mighty Wallet Challenge

3. Snag one of Loot Crate’s 2016 Convention Exclusive Crates

4. Cosplay as Hawkeye

Take two things geeks love, collecting and gaming, and you have a recipe for fun. But add a price tag to them and you have a potential recipe for disaster. It is universally accepted that geek culture isn’t a cheap one. 

Most of it revolves around specific purchases that help people fall in to varying groups. You have Star Wars fans, Trekkies, Doctor Who fans, LotR fans, gamers, roleplayers, LARPers, miniature tabletop players and a horde of others who fall into at least one, but usually multiples, of these options. And how do they show it? Usually with t-shirts, wallets, bags, wristbands, or any other number of options. But there are certain geek hobbies like collectible card games that take the obsessions of the geek culture to dangerous levels.

Collectible card games (CCGs for short) are games where players build their own deck out of an ongoing and ever growing collection of cards composed of those from starter packs and booster packs. Usually the packs have a distribution of cards between mostly common, some uncommon and a single rare. The more packs you purchase and you’ll likely find even harder to find special cards. In Magic: The Gathering, these would be Mythic Rares.

Usually a box of 36 packs will only contain a certain number of these sought after cards. The better the card and more rare it is will lead to players spending more between either pack purchases or just buying a card directly.

Hot on the heels of Comic-Con comes the next unboxing in the Loot Crate Wars series. For July and August, the guys at Loot Crate have created a two part crate. First, July kicked things off with Villains as its theme which started with an awesome super foe themed trailer on Loot Crate’s own YouTube channel. In it is some of the baddest of the bad as you’ll see in the unboxing video below.

Most notable of the Crate (while still trying to keep the article spoiler-free-ish) is a special variant comic for a number one that just came out from Marvel. Loot Crate’s subscriber base has gotten so big that just by putting it in the July crate, they literally doubled the preorders of the book.

Another day, another dollar. Another Loot Crate, another unboxing. Our apologies if you already came across it yesterday, but if you haven’t, you can check out Whiskey & Waffle’s Loot Crate War on the Adventure themed box. (Actually, even if you have already seen it, you can watch it again.)

This month’s Loot Crate theme is all about Adventure. As you can probably guess from the cover image above there is some Minecraft and some Legend of Zelda swag inside but also some Adventure Time love as well as some gear from some of our fellow YouTubers like Captain Sparklez and Markiplier.

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped what they were hoping would be a bomb, but has truthfully only ended up being a cause for more contention in the console war. After about six months of being outsold by the PlayStation 4, Microsoft has announced they will be releasing a Kinect-free version of the XBox One. Hitting shelves on June 9th, this will be just in time for the E3 frenzy and most likely hope to capitalize on new titles being announced at E3 bringing more popularity to the system. It will also drop the price to $399.

Instead of people being happy about the new lower price, the negative backlash came. Sony fanboys decried the move as desperation. While it can be said that Microsoft did need to do something to put the console on even ground with the PlayStation, it wouldn’t be an act of desperation.

Microsoft listened to the feedback and instead of dropping the price and losing money due to cost, they removed the big elephant in the room that was associated with that higher price point. Had they kept the Kinect and dropped the price or dropped the Kinect and lowered the price below the $399 mark before Sony had enacted any price drop at all on the PlayStation 4, that would have been an act of desperation.

Though it slipped under our radar for the Kickstarter Watch, the team over at Ink Whiskey were able to successfully crush a $12,000 goal on Kickstarter by reaching just shy of $40,000 to get their concealed gaming flask to market. Most of the clever flasks we’ve seen are usually hidden inside other objects, like the famous classic novel that when opened reveals all the pages have had a section cut out to fit the flask.

The team at Ink Whiskey decided to go for something else entirely by actually making a flask that looks identical to classic NES cartridges. As my flask sits on my desk, it takes a keen eye to actually pick up on something being askew. The plastic housing of the flask, especially from a distance, is indistinguishable from a classic NES cartridge.

Most people would glance over it unless they got to the label. Drunk Hunt with a duck crashing into a bottle or the Bar Hop Bros where a familiar looking plumber is jumping inside of a bar are two examples of the clever puns from the Ink Whiskey team. In their initial run, there are five total designs (and a sixth special edition if you include the gold Legend of Drink Kickstarter exclusive) but hopefully the series does well enough that they can do multiple series of this.

All over YouTube, you’ll find product placement. It’s a matter of fact today more than ever that advertisers are feeling the power of influencers on the space to help push their wares. And who can blame them with the success that companies like Tiger Direct or Dodge had with personalities like Rhett and Link or FreddieW? But it is rare you’ll see a channel so focused on pushing their own product and not just having it lead to sales but be a successful YouTube channel as well.

Best known for the world’s largest gummy worm as well as the world’s largest gummy bear (which cumulatively totaled over 30 million views, the team at Vat19 have amassed a following of over a half a million subscribers and over 500 videos featuring their products. The team at Vat19 gets their audience. They don’t just want their products to be fun, they want the advertising and feel of the brand to match it as well.

It may sound gimmicky on the surface. If you tell someone there’s a special pair of glasses they can wear while gaming that will reduce eye strain, it sounds like hype to sell overpriced goods that don’t actually work. And at first, I would have agreed with that assumption. But trying to be a fair and unbiased person, which is really a challenge for me, I put in a request for a pair of Gunnar glasses and to my surprise, they actually accomplished the job.

I won’t get into the science behind it. That’s mostly because any of the science I would know about it comes from reading the Gunnar website and as we all know, websites can provide whatever “facts” they need to in order to make a sale. Yes, a wonder drug may reduce hair loss but that’s because it kills you but at least they are still telling the truth that your hair doesn’t fall out.

Instead, I just did my own test. After a busy week at the office where I spent between 7 to 9 hours each day in front of a monitor I decided to spend the better part of a Saturday marathoning a game. It’s been some time since I have done a full on marathon but after the initial few hours it usually resulted in taking breaks to get up for various reasons, just to get my face away from the screen. Eventually, the time in between started to reduce and after a full day I’d have a nice headache to deal with.

If you’re an Android and Samsung fan, this is a great day for you. Why? Well, Samsung has just announced its brand new flagship Android-powered smartphone: the Galaxy S5. And yes, it looks pretty cool.

The new hotness features a 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, a 2.5GHz quad-core processor, a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 3GB of RAM, a 2,800 mAh battery and Android 4.4 KitKat. But wait, there’s more.

The Galaxy S5 also features a water-resistant case and a fingerprint scanner similar to the one Apple uses in its iPhone 5s. It comes in four colors including charcoal black, shimmery white, electric blue and copper gold.

Here are the full specs: