Hunting Power Discs – Dispatches From Infini-Dad

You hunt them. In stores. On the web. Your query proves elusive, but one day, you dream, your Disney Infinity Power Disc Collection will be complete.

And hopefully that glorious day comes before your sanity unwraps along with all those duplicates. (Curse you, Jack Skellington terrain disc.)

Sanity (or lack thereof) plays a large role in the collecting of the power discs – clearly the most obsessive aspect of Disney Infinity. Those blind bagged little buggers with their power ups, vehicles, and (horrific) abundance of horses, sometimes feel like the Ark of the Covenant.

You certainly don’t get the same obsession with the figures. Executive Producer John Vignocchi has always been up front about wanting figures to be easily attainable and not flood the stores with variants (I’m looking at you, Skylanders) or keep shipments to a cruelly small number (Raise your hand Amibo). Sure, a particular figure might not be at Target, but it’s most likely down the street at Toys”R”Us, GameStop, etc.

The allure of what may be underneath that crickle, crackle foil wrapping taps directly into the golden ticket syndrome in all of us. If I buy more, I’m bound to find the prize. And once started, it’s hard to stop.

The Initial Hunt

A few weeks into my son and my DI gameplay, I told myself, “Sure, we’ll pick up some packs once in a while.”

At $4.99 a package, I certainly wasn’t going to buy too many, let alone ALL of them.

That was the original plan, anyway. My initial unwavering line in the sand was continually redrawn.

“We’ll just get the cool ones.”

“Maybe only 2.0 discs.”

“We DO need all the terrains and skydomes for Toy Box creation.”

“You know, that Merlin’s Summons would save us the time of running after all those sparks.”

As the number of our discs and my rationalizations for buying them increased, the Subway Big Hero 6 satchel we kept our booty in soon gave way to the various PDI albums. Flipping through our incomplete collection, however, made it all the more apparent what we still needed. I could almost hear the faint echo of those empty spaces chanting “Fill us! Fill us!”

And speaking of filling the PDI albums, I wouldn’t have minded a strengthening power disc of my own to pull the little buggers out of those painfully tight spaces once we DID get them.

The Hunt Widens

After you’ve grown tired of unwrapping the same discs over and over again, you turn to online communities for trade or purchase and enter a whole new world, pun intended.

Since my Star Wars hoarding ceased in the beginning of the 2000s – roughly the same time as the rise of eBay and internet trading – I was unfamiliar with the rules, regulations, and faux pas inherent in collector to collector web transactions.

I learned quick.

Not only did my first trade result in being informed by a fellow trader it was bad mojo to use a particular kind of envelope, said trader took me to task publicly about it on one of the collecting sites.

My name wasn’t used, but for a second, I panicked. I’d been trade-shamed in front of the whole Disney Infinity community; no one would want to trade with someone whose envelope selections skills obviously were so poor. Hakuna Matata my foot, I was going to be Persona Non Grata! Thankfully, that second passed, and I’ve gone on to make wonderful trades although there’s few things worse in power disc collecting than discovering a desired piece in-store that’s already on its way in the mail.

Bad Hunter

What is it that drives us to collect? A sense of order? Completeness? Smarter Joes than myself can discuss the finer points of such things, but for me personally, I know I collect the discs to keep the rush going, make my son happy, and most importantly, it’s fun.

However, there can be a bit of a dark side to all of this.

During one of Toys”R”Us’ recent Power Disc Blowouts, we arrived ten minutes after opening to find out a very unscrupulous fellow had absconded with practically all of the heavily discounted discs leaving a group of bewildered parents and children in his wake. That a young girl we didn’t even know, as an act of kindness, handed us a few of her packs, so we wouldn’t leave empty handed only made his actions all the more nasty.

Maybe this “gentleman” was going to give away all the discs he bought to needy kids throughout the land, but I strongly doubt it. We all know he was looking to make a pretty penny on the secondary market, but as that famous line goes, he who has no sin cast the first disc.

Have I ever felt for angled or round edges in a pack to discern what type of disc may be inside? Sure. Have I ever rubbed my fingernail across the front in hopes of hitting the ridged lenticular face of a rare? Yes. Have I ever peeked inside a pack or two to see if it contains a Gravity Falls terrain disc? No comment.

If that isn’t reason enough for one to realize how things can go over the line from fun obsession to crazy town, those final two released power discs, the Falcon costume change and Ms. Marvel Team-Up, definitely should do the trick. I don’t think the DI higher-ups  should get any kudos for making them U.S. only and a GameStop exclusive thereby increasing everyone’s ravenousness, but the frothing of the mouth (mine included) did get out of hand.

Hunting Season Is Over… For Now

About a month ago, we did finally complete our set, and as much as I hate the overuse of the word, it feels  “cool” to have done so.

Like a phantom limb, I still get a jolt of excitement when I see sales on power discs as the stores make way for 3.0. I have to remind myself, we have them already. That last statement is not meant to come off as a brag, but to underline again the appeal of collecting the power discs. A pack is like a mini-Christmas. After ripping it open, it might be socks, but then again, it just might be a Red Ryder BB Gun.