It’s… The Spoils™ Web Blarg!

by Michael (Arcane Tinmen), Owner of The Spoils

Greetings all and welcome to the revitalization of the Web Blarg! We hope to continue to fill this Blarg with exciting content for the foreseeable future.

Before I begin I’d like to thank our new editor, Terence Dorman, who is spearheading this project and making sure the rest of us meet our deadlines.

Now, a bit about myself. My name is Michael Nielsen and I am the CEO and owner of Arcane Tinmen. As most of you know, Arcane Tinmen does not work solely on The Spoils as it is also the producer of Dragon Shield sleeves and a variety of other CCG accessories. I’m not above a little advertising, so you can see all we have to offer here.

Now that I have made my shameless plug, let me tell you a bit about myself. I have been playing and loving games forever. Ever since childhood I have loved all kinds of games. I recall at the age of seven or eight being stunned when my mother beat me big time in a game of Monopoly by purchasing some of the lesser properties and putting hotels on them instead of going for the big properties like the Boardwalk. I took this idea to heart and with my newfound insight I went on to beating the (r4p out of my kid brother for the next dozen or so games. It was a great era! Since then I have played all kinds of games such as normal card games, CCGs, board games, billiards, etc. The list goes on and on.

I entered the world of CCGs when Magic made its first appearance in Denmark in 1994 and played it for a good number of years. I even made it to a couple of Pro Tours, but in all fairness I have to admit that I couldn’t make it on my own as I had to rely on two great teammates to win a trip to New York for the first Team Pro Tour.

One of my favorite memories was in 1996 when Magic interest started declining at our local gaming club. I recommended to my brother that he sell all of his cards before the game was fully dead to make sure he would cut his losses. We agreed that this would be the right move and he sold his entire collection for about $800. The only problem, however, was that neither Wizards of the Coast nor the Magic community at large seemed to agree with my fortunetelling skills. I should also mention that my brother’s collection included 3x Black Lotus, 13x Moxes, 3x Time Walk, 3x Ancestral Recall, and A LOT of other cards.

Fast forward to the era of The Spoils. Some years ago the Scandinavian division of Arcane Tinmen was told by one of our retailers about a new and amazing card game that had launched in United States. We immediately got in touch with Tenacious Games, the owner of the game, and soon started distributing The Spoils to stores in Scandinavia. Unfortunately it was around that time that things started to sour for Tenacious, and we soon started to have problems with supply. Over a short period of time we went through three sales representatives before we were dealing directly with Tenacious Games CEO Scott Dodson, who was very friendly (as were all the other guys we dealt with), but soon even he failed to respond and that added to the rumors we had heard.

At this point it became pretty evident that Tenacious was about to fold.

Thinking that The Spoils was far too good a game to just fade away like that, we decided to take on the monstrous challenge of turning the ship around. We went into negotiations and, after a while, we were the proud owners of a quality game that would be a fitting match for our sleeves.

Since then a lot of things have happened. Things are not moving as fast as we would have liked, and we have certainly learned that even though we have the best and funniest game, the obstacles are still many. When you don’t have a big license like Star Wars, Pokemon, or Warcraft written all over your cards it makes it a little tougher to sell to the general market. Regardless, we continue to fight and progress is being made every day!

Over the next many months I will be using this blog to give you a small insight into what goes on behind the curtains of The Spoils. But before I go this time, I want to share with you all a glimpse of our plans for the next year. We plan to launch Seed 3 (finally) early in this new year. In addition to Seed 3 we will also be releasing two further sets in 2012, both of which will be taking place in the same era as First Edition. We have a great team working on this and we are really looking forward to getting the cards into the hands of our great players!

Until next time….

Yours truly,
Michael

Terence’s Note: Be sure to check back next week for the first post from R&D Lead Designer Ken Pilcher!