Rescuing the Spoils #6: Seed 3, Shade, and To Foil or Not to Foil
Jul 3rd, 2012 by Terence Jason Dorman
by Michael (Arcane Tinmen)
Yesterday was a special day for The Spoils and for me personally. As most of you probably recognize, this was the day that we finally released Seed3: Fall of Marmothoa. I know that you have all been waiting for this, but I assure you no one has been waiting for this to happen more than me!
Unlikely Heroes
One of the reasons this is particularly special for me is that it, to me, marks “the dawn of a new age.” While getting Seed 3 through production (which certainly took a lot longer and proved more difficult than we had ever imagined) we have, at the same time, been working on the start of the next block which has been named “Unlikely Heroes.” The first set is the by-now-well-known “Shade of the Devoured Emperor,” which will be one of three sets in the Unlikely Heroes block.
We have all of the artwork ready to go, except for single piece where the artist is still hanging a bit, but I expect this to be done as well this week, so this is very comforting. We have found some new great artists while keeping some of the great old guys. The new set looks really great.
Having the art all done of course means that the story for the set is in place, and the overall feel of the cards will not be changing moving forward. However, the names of the cards may still be tweaked. The rules side of the cards is pretty close to being done, but there are still cards that R&D are not quite satisfied with, so these may still be changing.
Also still remaining to do is to fill the cards with Spoils-ness in terms of subtext and flavor text. A lot of this has already been done but we are heeding the requests from the forums where people ask for more storyline. The storyline has always been there and has been present on the cards in terms of art and names and events, but for the most part this has been hidden from you, the players. As such, we are now trying to up the amount of flavor that is actually telling the story of the world.
It will still be a trade-off between wanting to keep some flavor just strictly fun stuff and/or inter-textual references to books, movies etc., and trying to avoid clutter on the cards with walls of text. We will be trying to do this all while trying to give out bits and pieces of the story so it will be a little easier to piece it all together. Of course a CCG will never be perfect for telling a story in details so it will continue to be in glimpses, but for future sets we are exploring other ways of making this more overt, but that is still to come.
To Foil or Not to Foil
As many of you have probably already noticed, there are no foils in Seed 3, and some of you may wonder what the reason behind this is. The answer to that is actually two-fold.
One of the reasons is that this is a fixed set and the idea of some cards being more rare than others, in terms of random foils, seemed a little strange. Plus, we were debating how exactly this should be done.
That brings me to the second reason. If we had gone for the foils in the fixed set then the price would have nearly doubled. Pairing these two reasons made us decide that we would do without the foils for this set.
We do like “shiny” as much as the next guy, but ultimately decided that the most important thing was to get the cards to you players at a reasonable price. We hope you agree.
I hope people had a lot of fun at the pre-releases this past weekend and that the slightly weird format was a lot of fun!!
One Response to “Rescuing the Spoils #6: Seed 3, Shade, and To Foil or Not to Foil”
[...] For instance, this recent blog is such a perfect example. It is actually what inspired me to write this post. On top of that, there’s a brand new spoiled card, not even a week after the release of Seed 3. These guys are absolutely doing what it takes to successfully relaunch this game. [...]