Kai (@thecardex) and Barber (@barber_tcg) met the way a lot of people meet on Tilt. A stream, a few deals, some back and forth banter in the chat. Then Barber came up to Edinburgh for the card show we sponsored, they met in person, and that was that. The community started calling it a bromance.
Stephen is one of our top buyers, a serious Pokémon collector who's in the chat most nights. He's based in Scotland, same as Kai, so instead of having his cards posted he went over to collect them in person. They got chatting, and Kai learned what Stephen was carrying at home.
Stephen's 8-year-old daughter, Avannah, is the reason he collects. She lives with a brain condition called open-lip schizencephaly. It causes seizures, blindness in one eye, and means she can't produce hormones or process emotions normally. One of the few things that reliably lights her up is Pokémon. The cards stimulate her brain and get her excited, and that's the real motivation behind Stephen getting into cards in the first place.
She needs surgery that costs around £4,260. When Kai found out, he didn't overthink it. He put together a charity stream.
Barber jumped in and donated over £1,300 of his own stock. Then the rest of the community arrived. 5 or 6 streamers got involved, plus buyer @uncletrog77. @madhousetcg ran his own stream and raised £100 on top.
“I’ve got little girls myself. I know Barber’s children as well, so it just seemed like a nice surprise to give somebody… If an opportunity came up where somebody needed help, then of course we would.” – Kai
Our sellers also set one more target for the night: 100 packs for kids in Glasgow Hospital, so more of them could have a bit of what lights Avannah up. They finished on 420.
Between the streams, the community has raised over £3,600 so far, including £500 from us. That's roughly 85% of what the surgery costs, and it's still climbing.
Ask Kai or Stephen why this happened on Tilt and not somewhere else and they both land on the same thing: the people. On other platforms, as Stephen puts it, you're just another number. Here, regulars know each other, sellers look out for their buyers, and a chat can turn into a friendship. Sometimes into something like this.
“The Tilt community is something special. I sat with my daughter and her boyfriend, and we got a bit emotional because to be able to do that on the stream was really special.” – Barber
You can shift product anywhere. Community is harder to find. A family got real help from people who mostly know each other through a card game and a livestream. Avannah's surgery is nearly there, 420 kids in hospital are getting packs, and the chat's still going. That's the part no marketplace can buy.
If you’d like to get involved, download the app at www.tilt.app and hop into Kai and Barber’s streams, or email rhianna@tilt.app.
- @thecardex
- @barber_tcg