A Haven for Playing SWU

“We wanted to create a space that went above and beyond the ‘hole in the wall’ game store that catered to the stereotypical gamer from media and instead was a place for everyone to feel not only welcome, but encouraged to be there.” -Matt

The Haven in Casselberry, Florida is the go-to place for Central Florida SWU players. Store owner Matt shares more about what makes it special.

What led you to establishing The Haven?

I started with Pokemon when I was a kid, moved on to Yu-Gi-Oh for a year or two and then finally landed in MTG in middle school. That’s where working in the industry started. It might not be the most serious start, but I was selling Magic in the school library every morning and buying kids collections to resell. In the more sincere start I was part of the opening staff for Cloak and Blaster and I was one of the very few online stores able to sell Flesh and Blood online when it was released and helped spread the game in FL. I managed the bar and launched their retail store in 2020 when restaurants had to go down to limited seating and mostly take out. Between that and being their TO for Flesh and Blood I realized the things I was enjoying about that job was the community building and running events. Me and my now wife Ally had discussed the possibility of taking over Cloak and Blaster if the owners ever sold, but it became increasingly clear that they had no intention to do so and that we either stayed there or we started our own store. We decided on the latter. We wanted to create a space that went above and beyond the “hole in the wall” game store that catered to the stereotypical gamer from media and instead was a place for everyone to feel not only welcome, but encouraged to be there. Ally had always felt like people in other stores merely tolerated her while we played in stores because “her boyfriend brought her” or people would talk down to her cause she was a woman and assume she didn’t know how to play. So we made The Haven everything we wanted back then. A place that reaches out to the community and tries to bring everyone together over games rather than just being a place to shop.

Ever since the pre-release of Spark of Rebellion, The Haven has hosted midnight events for each SWU set, including even midnight sales of the product’s actual release, which not every store in the area has done. What makes the midnight event a focus for The Haven?

I’ve been doing prereleases since I got into gaming. It’s my favorite time in games. Everyone is excited, all the cards are new, and everyone just wants to get games in with the new stuff. Midnight releases have really dropped off store calendars as the years have gone on and I really wanted to bring that magic back and the SWU community was excited about the game enough to make it work. I wanted it to happen personally, but I needed the community to support it too to make it work as a business.

Have there been any memorable moments around SWU for the store?

That first midnight release was really amazing. New game. First set. Showcases. The energy was really off the charts. [Insert joke about Anakin’s Midi-chlorians here]

The Haven will be hosting a Learn to Play event for SWU on March 1st. What was the inspiration for that?

So there’s two sides to the L2P. Community and Business.

Community - SWU grew really fast at first and it’s kinda tapered off for us lately. Attendance at locals has dropped and we wanna make sure the community can keep sustaining itself and growing healthy. So why not bring people in for a Learn to Play and get some new people into the game?

Business - We have so many 2-players starters and soft crates! Rather than trying to discount them and selling them online for pennies on the dollar we thought it would be better to break them up into decks to teach new players locally while also clearing out some shelf space for the new stuff! They get into the game for cheap, we move some product, our local scene grows. It’s a win-win-win!

What are you excited about for set 4? Are you looking forward to any new cards or leaders?

Sabine’s Masterpiece is a rad unit and also great to see more Spectre support. But let’s be real. Poe leader having an action that brings him out as a pilot and then an epic action that lets you bring him out as a unit that can also attach? That’s crazy. I’m loving the pilot focus of this set and some of the weird bases we’ve seen too. I would have loved to see a bit of a deviation from Han / Boba for the spotlight decks, but I get that they probably test better for marketing purposes. Overall very hyped to see how the game changes with this set release!

The Haven’s Learn to Play event will be Saturday March 1st at 1 PM.

Premier play is every Saturday at 6 PM.

The Haven is located at 3385 South US Hwy 17/92 Suite 269, Casselberry, FL, 32707