#minechest

So our first photo is a collection of most all the items I’ve gotten from the 4 chests I’ve received thus far. It’s missing a few items here and there like mini figures, but otherwise these are all the inner box items (the ‘outer’ item being the exclusive t-shirt). So far each box has come with a lenticular post card, which acts as the ‘what’s in the box’ card, just more vague and written like a travel log, a sticker, and a custom stamp, which are decorated to look like a block relevant to the chest theme. I’m actually rather fond of rubber stamps, but these ones are rather large, almost like you could use them for fabric patterning more than for stationery. The designs include a tree (minecraft beta, not featured), a ghast (nether), a sword (survive the night), a baby horse (animal farming), and a heart (cold taiga)(??). They come with an ink pad branded with the squid ink sac icon, which is a nice touch. It seems like they might plan to include enamel pins going forward, as there’s been one since the survive the night box (featured up at the top, torch, carrot, and tamed wolf). Anything that’s wearable in some way I think is a good product and I myself have gotten into enamel pins and brooches. Most of the boxes have also included a ‘crafting recipe’ for a paper craft you can make with your own materials. I can see how these would be fun for kids but it doesn’t interest me much, especially without pre-printed paper to make the craft with. I think it is a nice idea and the stage paper craft included in the taiga box is a step in the right direction, but could use some work. The survive the night and animal farming boxes included plushies which I think was a good product and certainly made the box feel more ‘full’ (more on the box itself later). I think these plushies were already widely available, but I myself didn’t have them. Aside that, the other items in the box have been singles or 3 packs of mini figures, and the hot wheels minecart was first included in the chest before going to retail (lol people we reselling them for 14 bucks each and then they came out at target for $1.20). I actually REALLY LOVE the minecart and I hope they do more items like this in the boxes, even if it doesn’t stay exclusive.

Next up are the shirts! This I think is where the main value of the chest is at; a totally exclusive t-shirt in every box. When you open the box, the shirt is what’s on top, along with the post card. Before the beta boxes had arrived anywhere and no one knew what to expect out of the boxes, I figured if nothing else, I love Minecraft, and I always need to wear clothes, and t-shirts are pretty much all I wear, WIN-WIN. The Nether was my first chest and I was stupid excited (I do in fact heart the Nether). I had hoped for a more exciting shirt, but dying in the Nether is a sentiment that I empathize with a lot (especially coupled with the box’s sticker: ‘Don’t hit the zombie pigman’). Next was the survive the night shirt which I think is my favorite. Fending off skeletons is my constant battle in survival mode, and the shirt is purple, what’s not to love? After that we got the animal farming shirt of mob spawn eggs. This is my second favorite, though I feel like it could have been on a different color shirt, parts of the design really recede into the shirt. Last is the cold taiga shirt, with a skeleton in flames giving you the bones you need to get a tamed wolf (if you’re lucky enough to tame one with just 1-2 bones). Next up is going to be the creeper shirt so I’m excited for the new design.

So obviously when you make a subscription box for Minecraft, of course you’d model it after the in game item. As more boxes have been released, each of the stickers included in the boxes gets added to the outside, and I assume the beta box was bare. It makes for a nice keep sake, but I have to wonder what it’ll look like over time, when it’ll be covered in stickers. Will they switch to bare boxes or start over after so many and keep adding? One thing I really wish they’d do is protect the box better. I was very impressed with the Pusheen box, which is heat shrinked in plastic with the label on the plastic, and arrives in great shape. Minechest arrives as you see in the image above, with the shipping label adhered to the bottom and the flaps shut with tape. The boxes arrive with banged up corners, dents, and scrapped off printing, and pulling up the tape to open the box damages the printing more. There’s always going to be some damage to boxes during shipping, but the difference the shrink wrap made between these two boxes was astonishing.

Something great they did do with the box was not only having it resemble a chest on the outside, but like a block relevant to the theme on the inside. Did you know you could just as easily turn the box inside out? BECAUSE GUESS WHAT:

BOOM. New decorations, and will turn that dinged up box into something more interesting. Unfortunately that’s about the only super nice thing I have to say about the physical box. (lol mood change) So we get our box and it’s kinda heavy, or at least feels pretty solid. We open it up and get our post card and our shirt, how exciting!

Then we remove our shirt and pull back the divider to get to the rest of our box filled to the brim ---

Oh. It’s so.....empty. Ultimately, the shape of the box has led to it being visually underwhelming in a very bad way. Though to be honest, the box itself is a little underwhelming as a whole. I have to admit that I’m new to subscription boxes, I’ve only received the four for this one and the two of the Pusheen box (my interests are a little too specific for me to be satisfied with something like Loot crate or Anime Bento). My basic impression has been that the value of the items in the box are always of a significant amount more than what’s charged for the box. So maybe a 12 dollar box (plus shipping, $6 bucks?) has 25+ dollars of stuff in it, a value of double the base cost, and the obvious trade off is a chance to have random items pushed that might have otherwise done bad in a different market, or are even overstock that vendors want to get rid of, etc. And the temptations put in are usually the promise of exclusive items, which can be harder to pin a value on ( especially for unconventional things like rubber stamps) because they’re not openly available to purchase, With Minechest I feel like I’m getting the exact same value or even less than what I paid for the box. Taking the Taiga box above, let’s say that shirt has a generous value of 18 bucks, based on old jinx prices (though retail shops usually sell those same jinx shirts for half the cost now). The 3 pack of minis cost $8.99 at target. I’ll price the sticker at $3 using their retail stickers as reference, The dog pin, $6, and the stamp $7 just based on similar retail items. Anything printed on paper I’ll effectively consider worthless and just assume it gets lumped in with the cost of printing the physical boxes. So that’s about $43, with the total cost of the box being $37 (base cost of $30). So only about a 30% increase of base value.

So we open the box and our postcard and shirt are on top. This month’s postcard is not as thick as the previous ones so I expect more tweaks to random things in the future. I already unwrapped the shirt to look at it before

How most people acquire their first wolf friend: being a vulture

Lifting back the cardboard and we get to the other contents. Some mini-figures, another stamp block, and some other interesting looking things.

So top we had a 3-pack of mini-figures (I’m not sure if ice is the most recent one but it fits our taiga theme). I almost bought this exact set at target the day before so kinda glad I persisted to not spend money. Up top is our rubber stamp, which for some reason is a heart. I was hoping for a snowflake or wolves or something. Then we have a tamed wolf pin, a paper craft of a taiga scene, and some block stickers.