2014 was a big year for Ground Zero. It was the year we began our third decade of comic and game retailing in East Texas and even after more than 20 years, it showed there was still room for amazing growth!
When the year began we were still giving away cards from the very first Magic the Gathering expansion set, Arabian Nights! Every Friday Night Magic event saw anywhere from a couple of cards to a dozen or more given away randomly to the players, adding something extra to the normal prizes.
In addition to regularly scheduled gaming days, Ground Zero hosted a number of special gaming events throughout the year. The ever popular industry leading Magic the Gathering game launched four new sets 
in 2014, beginning with Born of the Gods in February, Journey Into Nyx in May, 2015 Core Set in July and the start of a brand new block, Khans of Tarkir, in September.
We devoted the entire month of September to $5.00 Booster Drafts for Friday Night Magic and followed that by immediately kicking off the Qualifiers for the first ever Tyler, Magic Invitational. This unprecedented series of events saw Ground Zero working with two other area stores, Geek World in Tyler and Three Suns Unlimited in Longview, to host a series of eight qualifiers that led into the final event in December where the winners competed in a Fixed Sealed tournament for a complete set of Revised, valued at over $2000.00! Phil Shoemaker won a very intense final round and took home the Grand Prize.
Ubiquitous as it might have been, Magic wasn’t the only collectible card game played at Ground Zero. Pokemon had a strong showing in 2014, with several new sets released. We hosted Pre-Release events for XY in January, Flashfire in May, Furious Fists in August and Phantom Forces in November. Several other Pokemon events drew large crowds, with over 70 local players attending the City Championships on December 13th.
We also pulled off a major coup when Tyler was awarded the Star Wars LCG Regionals. This event, held on May 17th saw players arriving from as far away as West Virginia. The 2013 Grand Champion attended, as did the second and third place winners from the previous year’s World Championship event. In fact, the Tyler Regionals had the largest attendance of all the Regionals held at that point and was one of the smoothest, best events we have run over our twenty-plus years.
2014 also saw a tremendous rise in the player base and popularity of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. When 2014 began we were hosting one game day a month, however during the year parent company Games Workshop released a new edition of the complete Revised Rules and several new Codices, all of which combined to renew greater interest in the game. By the time fall rolled around, we were hosting Games Workshop days every weekend, with our GW tables also seeing game play at various points throughout the week.
Finally, board games continued their rise in 2014. We hosted International Tabletop Game Day on April 5th. This annual event draws out board game players of all types and tests the capacity of our tables to hold them all!
While games may have dominated our schedule at times, there were plenty of other events at Ground Zero during 2014. On May 3rd we hosted the fifteenth Free Comic Book Day. This event has not only become an annual tradition in the comic industry, but has also served to inspire similar events in other retail fields, such as Record Store Day.
Also in 2014, Ground Zero began hosting the Graphic Fiction Appreciation Society. This informal group meets twice a month to discuss comics of all kinds with a specific focus on a different graphic novel at each meeting. In 2014 they covered a vast array of books including Saga, Deadpool: Killistrated, Sixth Gun, Harbinger, Understanding Comics, Hellblazer and many others.
Other notable events at Ground Zero included the May 21st appearance of Blake Ovard, creator of the new canine super hero comic Tugg: A Hero Among Us. Not only did Blake appear to autograph advance copies of the new book, but he brought Tugg along as well, who posed for pictures and ”pawtographed” a few books himself.
On September 25th, we held a special event in conjunction with the University of Texas at Tyler Library to bring attention to Banned Book Week. There was a costume contest and a talk on the history of censorship and comics.
In October we once again sponsored the Tyler Rose City Comic Con. This event proved even bigger than the one in 2013, with special guest Colin Baker (Doctor Who) bringing thousands of fans.
All these events kept the store busy and full for the entirety of the year. So full, in fact, 
that on August 3rd we moved to a much larger location. At over 6000 square feet, the new location allowed us to host multiple events at the same time, keep permanent tables set up for games play, mini-wargame play and RPG events all at the same time.
All in all, 2014 was a spectacular year for us, and there is every indication that 2015 will be even better.