Ordering My Golden Child Game Changer Albums via Ktown4u and Makestar

Golden Child has come back with their second full album on August 2nd, 2021! On July 20th at 3PM KST, Woollim dropped the album details: a limited version (which thankfully has no randoms!) and 3 normal versions (2 photocards out of 100 amongst all 3 versions; 1 postcard out of 10 per version). Preorders also opened at the same time. I ordered one copy of the limited version from Ktown4u within an hour (there were technical difficulties on Ktown's end). By the end of the 20th, the limited version was already sold out from Ktown but later was back in stock (and again out of stock) on the 21st.

My Ktown4u package shipped on August 3rd and arrived on August 5th. The album and preorder benefits (random poster out of 3 and accordion postcard) came wrapped in several layers of bubblewrap, followed by a strip of air fillers, then placed inside a sturdy cardboard box.

Here is the limited album at the bottom, followed by the folded poster, and lastly the accordion postcard at the top. To my surprise, the accordion postcard came in 2 resealable plastic bags.

While generally everything arrived in pristine condition, on the back cover there is a long horizontal black smear towards the bottom. This was underneath the shrinkwrap, so it's probably a manufacturing defeat that I'll just have to live with.

As for the normal albums, I was holding off until online retailers with videocall events and preorder benefits posted. Makestar opened up their event on July 27th while My Music Taste didn't open up an event during preorder period at all.

As always, I made my table of prices in USD for shipping to the US, with a breakdown of how many albums. Makestar has a Set 1, which is 1 normal album of your choice, and Set 2, which includes all 3 normal albums. After a lot of contemplation, I decided to order 4 of the Set 2s from Makestar. If you think about it, each inclusion becomes under $5 (1 Makestar photocard, 2 album photocards, and 1 postcard) which isn't bad at all especially for those who are trying to collect.

The Makestar event closed on August 1st and the event page states that orders will be delivered sequentially from August 5th. The event page did update on August 5th to show the status "reward shipping start". On August 9th, I received a shipping notification from DHL for my Makestar package.

My Makestar package arrived on August 10th in a sturdy cardboard box. The albums had a secure layer of bubblewrap and there was a layer of air fillers covering half of the box.

Removing the air fillers, we see the folded posters at the bottom, accordion postcards just above, and then the stack of albums wrapped in bubblewrap on top.

Here is a closer look at the preorder benefits, each in their own resealable plastic bag.

Here are all of the contents of my package: 12 folded exterior posters (3 of Version C, 3 of Version B, 3 of Version A), 12 accordion postcards, 12 Makestar A holographic photocards (which were placed on top of the stack of CDs inside the bubblewrap), and 12 albums (3 of Version C, 3 of Version A, 3 of Version B).

The Makestar photocards came in sets of 3 photocards per packet, meaning that there is no guarantee to receive all 10 different photocards despite buying at least 10 albums as it appears random. These are the 4 packets I received.

These are my pulls from each of the 4 packs. Out of 12 photocards, I received 2 Daeyeols, 1 Y, 1 Jangjun, 2 Tags, 3 Seungmins, 1 Jaehyun, 1 Jibeom, and 1 Donghyun. I'm missing Joochan and Bomin.

Each album comes with 1 transparent postcard out of 10 per version, along with 2 photocards out of 100 across all 3 versions. My Makestar pulls have never been good, and this is no exception with having the same pulls for all 4 copies of my Version A. I was really hoping not to have duplicates for the postcards since those seem harder to trade due to its size...

Here is a closeup of the postcards I pulled. Lots of Jangjun!

And here are the photocards I pulled. Out of my 24 photocards, 12 are duplicates...

Overall, I always cave into Makestar when it comes to preordering Golden Child albums, and then subsequently getting myself into dealing with so many duplicates. But it has also brought me into the wonderful world of trading~ I'll be blogging about all versions of Game Changer in an upcoming post!