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.

This is the first of three (possibly four) recap videos from San Diego Comic-Con International 2016 from my trip this year. As it is my eighth year going as a part of The Flickcast, it has been an honor covering the convention in a variety of ways such as photo galleries, interviews, visual tours and unboxings. This year will be no different. Later this week, our Comic Con shopping haul video will release followed by our Field Trip video where we take you down to the Con floor and even some of the VIP parties.

Our first video kicks off with the Loot Crate Gallery of Heroes Convention Exclusive Crate. Founders of the monthly geek in a box phenomenon, Loot Crate has maintained the top spot in the subscription box community.

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

As is quickly becoming a tradition, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, DC Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Animation unveiled a new Batman movie at a world premiere event at WonderCon on April 3. Inspired by best-selling graphic novel, Batman: Court of Owls, Batman vs. Robin is an excellent addition to the ever expanding universe of DC’s original movies.

Picking up on three months after Son of Batman left off, Batman vs. Robin showcases the still tenuous relationship between Bruce and Damian Wayne as they each try to better fit into their respective roles as father and son. Being crime fighting partners is both a help and a hindrance to their relationship, especially when it seems like Batman can’t rely on Robin to put aside his League of Assassins tendencies. The duo are to the test when Talon, the enforcer for The Court of Owls, tries to lure Damian in as his new protégé while Gotham’s secret society also enacts a plan that could destroy the city.

The film boasts a strong voice cast, including the return of Jason O’Mara (Batman), Stuart Allan (Robin), and Sean Maher (Nightwing). Allan once again brings the perfect amount of petulance to Damian and Batman vs. Robin goes the distance to remind us Damian isn’t a child the way the previous Robins, including Dick Grayson, were.

He was born and raised with assassins. Nightwing even remarks to Batman about Damian, saying, “He’s just a 10-year-old boy.” But Batman gently corrects him. “No. He just looks like one.” The film drives this message home so well it doesn’t seem as impossible for a kid to face off with full grown adults, even Batman, and hold his own or come out ahead.

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.

Comic-Con International 2014 is set to kick off in just over 48 hours and after selling out 130,000 passes in just 90 minutes, San Diego is about to be descended upon by hordes of Con newbies. Every year those of us who have survived and live to tell the tale make sure to pass on our knowledge (whether or not they ask for it) to try and help these rookies get the most of their SDCC experience.

The best most important piece of information to take from this article is to have a game plan. Without knowing what your goals are for the show, there is a serious risk of wasting a lot of time only to not get the experience you’re hoping for. Luckily there is no shortage of information about the show, the exclusives, the panels, the autograph signings, the celebrities and everything else going down in San Diego during the show.

Some games are defined by very clear mechanics. These games like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh or even Pokemon come down to two things, the draw and the ability to strategically exploit said mechanics. As with a game of chess, a game of Magic can be decided within the first three turns. Then there are the other games that are all about personal taste and even what some could think of as a trump card can be defeated out of nowhere. Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples are two such examples. Ultimate Battle looks to join that group with their Kickstarter that launched yesterday.

Ultimate Battle is what appears to be a nerd’s dream with a solution for solving the most unreasonable arguments. Players draw their own avatar on a play mat and get some weapon cards. They then theorize how their character would kill another using their items then the defending player comes up with how they’d defend it. If they agree that the defense works then the next player goes.

If the argument continues, there is a deck of dispute cards meant to solve the argument fairly, and by fairly it is by completely arbitrary and unrelated methods like Rock, Paper, Scissors or whoever has the shortest hair. It ends up being the best way to solve these kinds of arguments anyway since neither side is going to concede if Batman could use a blue whale to kill the Terminator whose only defense is spiders.

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.

At WonderCon 2014, fans crammed into the Arena to watch the world premiere of DC Universe’s latest animated feature, Son of Batman, and with good reason. The film, which is set to release on DVD and Blu-ray on May 6, delivers fun and adventure with a fresh plot based Grant Morrison’s 2006 DC storyline.

Bruce Wayne (Jason O’Mara) receives an unwelcome visit from his former lover and foe, Talia al Gul (Morena Baccarin), who’s brought with her a son Batman never knew he had. Damien (Stuart Allen) is exactly the type of kid you’d expect to come from these two: smart, strong, ruthless, and bloodthirsty. Bats, with some patience and an assist from Nightwing (Sean Maher), is able to get through to his long-lost son, and it’s not long before the arrogant kid is donning his own version of the Robin costume. He soars off alongside his father to take down criminal mastermind, Deathstroke (Thomas Gibson).

In keeping with its later animated features, DC does not hold back on the blood and gore of the battles. Damien, who is supposed about 10, takes quite a beating and there’s an especially cringe worthy part involving daggers. Still the action is very welcome and keeps the plot speeding ahead. One of my favorite sequences involved the new dynamic duo fighting off ninja man-bats, engineered by a kidnapped Dr. Langstrom (Xander Berkeley).

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.

On day two of WonderCon, Fox did its best to take over the convention in Anaheim. The studio showed footage from several of its upcoming films and politely remained mum on Director Bryan Singer’s recent legal troubles.

The clip from X-Men: Days of Future Past, which included a faceoff between Iceman and Sunspot, certainly excited audiences in the Anaheim Convention Center’s Arena. Fox slyly avoided audience questions by saving X-Men to the end of the presentation. In truth, fans had already gotten their fill of footage and Q&A from the other movies’ cast and crew.

Perhaps trying to answer the YA smash hit The Hunger Games, Fox now has its own teen post-apocalyptic movie in The Maze Runner. Director Wes Ball and author James Dashner were both inspired by Ender’s Game, Lord of the Flies and Lost when creating The Maze Runner and it showed in the brief but thrilling preview seen in Anaheim.