Hello everyone and Happy New Year! It’s been quite some time since I last posted anything here or on Two Clicks From KO, so I figured it would be a good idea to give you all an update with where I’m at and what to expect.

So how are you all? How was your New Years? Did you have a great holiday season? Have your games been going well? How interested are you in Captain America and The Avengers? I hope all of your answers were pretty positive of course! As you all know, I’ve been missing in action from the Clix world as a content creator for a few months with my last article going up in October which I never realized never had pictures included. Talk about a rushed exit. Sheesh…

Working For the Weekend

Anyway, as most of you know if you read my posts in the fall, I was promoted at my work to management which meant life got incredibly busy and stressful. For those first few months, I wanted to pull my hair out and I was honestly really hating the decision I had made. I’d come home absolutely drained and not wanting to do anything. I couldn’t even escape work in my dreams as my subconscious would run rampant, reminding me of the priorities of the next day and stressing about all the items I was responsible for now.

Thankfully that’s more or less gone to the wayside. I still think about work a lot and I still have the lack of drive to do anything when I get home, but it’s not as bad as it was. See, most of my articles, if not all, were written during my downtime at work which I had a decent amount of because I mastered my craft damn well which earned me my promotion. Now that I have maybe 10 minutes of downtime a week at work, that leaves no room to write any new articles, let alone team building for weekly games. Set reviews with 10,000 words updated as characters are revealed? Yeah right! That’s a far dream these days.

But work isn’t everything. There have been other issues which have been a massive obstruction to my drive to write.

Love What You Do?

A hobby should be fun, right? That’s what I’ve always believed, and back around 2013 or 2014 when I quit playing Magic, I did so because I wasn’t having fun. The people were rude and the friends I would play with more or less would create the most boring decks that made me hate playing. Games were either over before they started or they would grind to an unstoppable lock where I couldn’t do anything. It sucked.

Wait a minute, isn’t this about Heroclix? Oh yeah, right. Anyway, when I got back into Clix in 2015, I swamped my friends and Facebook with invitations of learning how to play the game and provided pieces for free. I had a few takers but not many. Then I found my first venue and met my best friend of the time. It was the golden age of my Clix life and it was fantastic. But little did I know that trouble was looming.

Just over two years ago, our judge had to leave California because of the insane costs of living, and so I took over as judge. This was great, but it also meant that I rarely got to play and running games became a task rather than going somewhere to have fun every Sunday. Then a few months later our venue hit financial ruin and had no choice but to close the business. I was able to relocate us to another store that my friend owns, but we never really recovered the player count.

Fast forward to right around the time I was promoted and my player count had hit an insanely small number every week, with most weeks having one or two people showing up. As a lot of you judges know, it’s extremely hard to get players to join this game. No matter what I did, people just weren’t interested. Different game types, everyone wins events, asking players what they wanted – it didn’t matter. People just stopped showing up.

The cherry on top was my best friend getting out of the game. He was introduced to Warhammer and has made the jump over and liquidated all of his Clix. Unfortunately he was the only person I got to play with outside of the occasional odd-man event at my store, so the game pretty much died for me. I would go into my game room, look at my glass cabinet of Heroclix displayed and feel nothing but anger and regret. Another massive collection of something that turned into scrap. All those dollars wasted. And we all know how little cash you can get from clix – it’s trade credit, trying to sell your entire collection for a massive discount, or piecing it out incredibly slowly and eating tons of time to hopefully recover some cost.

Other Factors, Too

While I can’t get into one factor that also led to my incredible frustrations with the game, I can say that the people involved was a big hit to my love of the game. It really made me feel poor and start to not like the game.

WWE was a massive force of wanting to completely ditch the game as well. Remember where I said I was getting 1-2 people per week? December saw that number drop to one player, and that player would constantly play WWE teams making any ranged characters worthless and forcing me into counter teams (which I wouldn’t do), or basically taking the time out of every Sunday to sit and hate the time I was spending at the store. We played one game where I decided to have some fun and play the Fast Forces 8-bit turtles. Hard to KO, but their stats aren’t that great today. Meanwhile the WWE figures were protected from anything I would attempt and all rocking 20/21 defenses and 12/13 attack values for just over the points of my turtles. It was the last straw. Simply put, the WWE figures TO ME are incredibly undercosted and have too many immunities to make them on a level playing field.

Depression was hitting pretty hard by this point as I wasn’t seeing any friends, hated my life at work, was dealing with family drama, losing money, etc. etc. It was basically the perfect storm and there were several points in the last two/three months were I had decided to completely drop the game and sell everything I had.

Thankfully, Aaron (Two Clicks From KO) and I had a great conversation and he persuaded me to keep my stuff and just cut my spending entirely to see how things would go from here.

Where Do We Go From Here?

At the time of this writing, I hosted my first game at the store in roughly a month of vacation and actually had a good time. The new spoilers for Captain America are pretty exciting and while I’m not liking the power creep (though the 17-defenses do help with that), there are some excellent figures I can’t wait to have. Immortal Hulk has a special place in my heart as Ewing’s run is probably in my top-5 comic runs of my history in comics dating back to 2004.

Clix is getting a little fun again.

We’ve dropped our events to bi-weekly so I can spend more time with my wife and friends, and most importantly, get back into running my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I’m having a TON of fun painting my miniatures for the amazing Hellboy board game (follow me on Instagram!) and occasionally painting D&D models. Work isn’t nearly as bad and while still very stressful some days, there’s been a large wave of recognition from my team members and how grateful they are of my leadership.

So what does this mean for Heroclix and writing? Honestly, and I know you hate to see this, but I’m not sure at this point. What I do know is that I’m still just a bit too removed from the game still to WANT to write about it. When I come home from work, I’m not in the frame of mind to write about Heroclix. I don’t want another job on top of my job, and with weekly articles, that’s exactly what I was doing.

Instead, I’d like to aim for an article every now and then if my interest in the game does in fact come back. Fantastic Four (read: Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom) coming back will probably be a big canon for that, so we’ll see how things progress along the way. I know this isn’t the answer you all want, but I owe it to myself, and to you, to be honest about where I’m at and how I’m feeling.

As some of you are aware, Ares has decided to start his own podcast, which means that while I’m still on “hiatus”, Aaron is once again back to running Two Clicks From KO. If I do return to writing, I have to make a decision on whether or not I continue Clix Fix or just move forward with Two Clicks From KO. It’s a serious consideration and the only reason I don’t just jump over there full-force is because this blog has a lot of sentimental value to me.

What I can promise you all is updates more often until I have a definitive answer for you. I won’t leave you in the dark for so long. I’ll talk with Aaron about where I’m at and see if maybe I transfer over to just doing the podcast with him if he’s up for it. That’s a route that doesn’t take up nearly as much time, although I do know you all like reading what I write. I dunno.

Just know that things are coming back around for me and I do miss it here.

Thanks for your time everyone. I appreciate it and if Clix Fix does roar back up, I hope I can recover the readers I’ve rightfully lost. Take care and I wish you all the best!

-AJ