The TCG scalping market is full of cunning scam artists and people who resort to physical violence when their score is denied to them. But it’s also full of people who are just kinda flying by the seat of their pants. Middle Tennessee Gaming, a card shop in Nashville, was nearly robbed by one such person, and the video footage of the attempted cardnapping is pretty funny.
The robbery happened on November 8 during a pre-release event for Magic: The Gathering’s Star Trek collaboration, and according to shop owner Jeff Podis, this is the fourth attempted robbery the store has dealt with in the past three months. The clip shows a store employee showing a customer a binder of Star Trek cards when a person wearing a mask and cap comes in and tries to take it off the counter. The store employee holds onto the binder, and after about four seconds of tug-of-war, the would-be thief retreats as he’s chased out by another person.
Not that every thief has to have an entire heist in place to make off with the spoils, but it is funny to see that this guy had no real plan beyond yanking a binder of cards worth thousands of dollars off a counter right as an employee was in the middle of showing it to another customer.
According to Podis, the man who tried to grab the binder had shown up earlier in the night and didn’t seem to know much about the cards, but Podis spoke to him because he was trying to make Middle Tennessee Gaming a welcoming space for a potential newcomer.
“When these thefts happen, [what’s worse] than the financial hurt, which is substantial, is the demoralizing feeling of people in this space. We try to take care of each other, and so for outsiders—and there aren’t very many outsiders because we are such an inclusive community—to come in for theft or for stealing or for being duplicitous or malicious, that’s demoralizing more than it is anything.”
Well, at the very least, no one got hurt, and the would-be thief now has an embarrassing clip of him circulating on the internet. Shoutout to the employee who held onto the binder, which Podis estimates held around $45,000 worth of Star Trek cards.
