What I've been doing and has worked well for me so far. Of my 2 NIB Stern purchases
- purchased ACDC Luci in 2014 giving the code 2 years to mature.
- purchased TWD in 2016 giving the code 2 years to mature.
You can still buy NIB, just wait until its been out awhile and purchase on a later run when the consensus is that the code it good. It helps that I generally could give a shit about LEs, though I made an exception with Alien, but that's not a Stern.