Atlas Games: California Game Store
Atlas Games is a game store located in City of Industry, California at the Frank & Sons Collectible Show. According to Wizards’ Store & Event Locator, there are nine game stores in the City of Industry area. While Atlas Games doesn’t show up on this list as they currently do not offer in-store gameplay, they have almost any Magic: The Gathering card you could need. Joey Ruiz, Owner, Rick Chong’s right-hand man, builds a lot of Commander decks for customers. He expressed a desire for Atlas Games to have its own storefront location to sell products more than three days a week and offer in-store play.
While Joey likes the current location, Frank & Sons Collectible Show is only open Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. This limitation is out of Atlas Games’ control. However, the store supplements sales online via TCG Player. Being located in California has its perks, though. Some visitors to the store are well-known artist, Post Malone, and NFL football player Cassius Marsh.
Atlas Games Employee Turns Passion Into Helping Customers
Currently, the employees of Atlas Games are all part-time employees with full-time jobs. Joey expressed aspiration to work at the store full-time as it would tie directly to his passion for Magic: The Gathering and building decks for customers. As someone who used to grind competitive events, Joey has his pulse on the grindstone when it comes to Magic: The Gathering cards. While he’s not actively playing in tournaments as often as he used to, he makes sure to know what’s actively going on in various formats. Doing so gives him insight into cards that his customers may want.
Store Owner, Rick Chong, handles the sealed product orders for the store. The store opens sealed boxes to assure they have enough single cards on hand to sell. Prior to owning a store, Rick was a professional Magic player. Joey admired Rick’s skill at the game and learned from Rick’s successes to parlay into his own. Now Joey prefers playing Cube Draft and Commander. Commander is the bread and butter of the store in terms of sales and customers requesting deck builds.
Joey also notes that he enjoys selling at conventions especially when Grand Prix was a thing. He hopes that Wizards of the Coast brings them back someday. Overall, Joey is greatly appreciative of Atlas Games’ customer base:
The most rewarding thing is having such a great customer base that really appreciates our work and the ability to get cards in the hands of players and collectors like ourselves. The business has really given us the opportunity to meet some of the coolest people.
Joey Ruiz, Atlas Games
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