So I did an unboxing post with my last Minechest a few days ago, but today I want to give a little showing of all the stuff I’ve gotten so far. Besides some of the generic items (mini figures), I’ve kept almost all the items in their boxes and have only just brought them out to really enjoy them. More text after the photo!
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.
This wouldn’t even be the least bang for buck box, I’d say the Nether chest actually cost more than the value of the items in the box (shirt 18, minecart 1.30, 2 x mini singles about 8, sticker 2, postcard and crafting thing $1 tops, stamp 7, pretty much the same as the box cost) . Like I said, it’s kinda hard to pin down a monetary value on some of these, because we have no idea how much it cost them to make any of the exclusive items (all that depends on volume). Judging by how often they reset their closing date for the next boxes, I don’t know if that’s indicative of low sales or extremely high demand (from one of the emails regarding a delay, one of the boxes was so high in volume it delayed the next one).
When I signed up I figured it nothing else I was going to get a shirt that I know I’d want to wear, and I’d be ok with pretty much anything they gave me, even if it was a repeat of stuff I have, because I love pretty much all the Minecraft merchandise that’s available. There was nothing for me to really lose as long as the box value never went below what I paid for it. But I feel like the box sits exactly on that threshold. Meanwhile little Pusheen box costs 43 bucks total and specifically sells itself as having $100+ worth of totally exclusive merch inside. That little Pusheen has presentation and value that I truly didn’t expect. Can they manage it specifically because they’re only a quarterly box? Or does their value generate enough volume for them to make the costs back? Does Minechest need a change in quality of items, quantity of items, price of box, frequency of shipping, or a combination of all those factors? They sent out a query for reviews on the last one and I already sent them some of these thoughts so I can only hope others feel the same and they’ll re-evaluate for the future, because it’s risking getting stale very fast.
And despite me just totally shitting on Minechest (I came in here all sunshine and rainbows wanting to show off cool loot, then wrote a Nanowrimo day’s worth of bile, jesus), I still recommend it. Because i have to acknowledge that even if my assumptions of what a subscription box could or should be are right or wrong, that I could just be looking at this the wrong way. Maybe what I value and want isn’t really what a sub box is there to provide, More importantly, maybe this box wasn’t MADE for me. Like at all. Maybe it was made for all the parents with kids super into minecraft and minecraft youtubers, and gives them a way to continue enjoying their game even more, because now there’s a box specifically for their thing. (You know, even though it was our thing first. Get off my lawn!)
Maybe it’s not the best ‘value’ box right now, but it’s trying to do something different and I can appreciate that, and hope that in the future they’ll take that feedback they asked for and use it to make a genuinely better box for whatever audience it is they are targeting. At the end of the day even if I could have bought some of the same things at the store for the same prices, I’m not losing any money I wouldn’t have already spent on Minecraft stuff, and I'll just have to wait and see what they have in store for us next.
I actually got this in last tuesday but haven’t even had a chance to really look at it much less post about it. This is the 5th Minechest in the series, though it’s the 4th one I’ve received (missed the beta one).
Minechest is a subscription box that is only full of minecraft items, so it’s great for people who want to get random stuff in the mail but only like minecraft (now if only they’d make a Pokemon themed subscription box...). One of the main features are items completely exclusive to minechest; each box will always have a unique shirt that you can’t get elsewhere (for the foreseeable future), among other items. Also, the next one is Creeper themed, and ends in less than a day so you should subscribe immediately if you want in on that. More below!
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.
I tried, and it’s mostly self explanatory when you consider how blocks face in the game, but I could not for the life of me set this paper craft up correctly. I really wish it had some suggestions on how to put it together, it flops around so bad I can’t even crease anything. I’m just holding it up in this picture. It’s a super cute idea, and less laborious than the full paper craft kits (and fits the minis well) but dang.
That’s about it! I’ll be making another minechest related post to show off the previous contents (now that I’m finally taking them all out to enjoy them). Thanks for looking! Remember there’s still time to sign up for the Creeper chest, but not much!
