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Originally Posted by BlackSheep
One of each was just an example. A box containing exactly the same cards as a 24-booster box, but without the cards sorted into the little foil packets, would be cheaper, yes?
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Not much cheaper at all. Our foil packaging had a flat setup fee and then probably costs a few cents per pack after that.
You wouldn't want a bunch of loose, unprotected cards floating around a POP display so we'd probably have had to shrinkwrap them in large blocks to protect them. The price would have been very close. I know you don't want to believe it, but it's true. We weren't charged a whole lot for wrapping them.
It was actually cheaper for us to produce them as boosters than it would have been to produce them as decks, because we only needed one type of packaging for all 326 cards in the draft packs. If we'd subdivided them into decks and you wanted to know the contents then we would probably have used deck boxes as over-sized expansion packs, would have had to pay for 6 or 7 more custom deck boxes (including custom graphic design for each) and the price would have been even higher. If we packaged them as the minimum number of decks they wouldn't be "playable" decks, they'd just be holding the same cards as are in the draft packs (which need to be cobbled together into playable decks). As playable decks we would have had to probably package them as about 12 new decks with lots of redundant cards and custom packaging, skyrocketing the price for a play set.
You aren't paying primarily for the foil wrap. And since we have a non-random collation, we didn't incur any wildly high special fee for grouping them (it's like printing 24 small, collated decks).
What you are primarily paying for in each draft box is the 326 cards inside. That's a lot of cards. That's like the equivalent of about 6+ stand alone indie card games.
Here's the thing -- when we printed decks we printed 6000 of each and got the price point fairly low. By comparison we only printed 1000 displays of draft packs. Some of those cards are only one per box (since that's all you need as a player) and the marginal cost is much higher to print something 1000 times than to print it 6000 times. The short print runs of lots of diverse cards is contributing MUCH more to the price than the foil wrap did.
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The problem as I see it is that you've packaged the game as a CCG, aimed it at the CCG crowd, and tried to encourage CCG tournament play, but whenever someone calls it a CCG you feel the need to 'correct' them.
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We are a CCG. We are a customizable card game. Why do we feel the need to "correct" people? Because earlier in the thread you implied that if we had a box of one of everything then it wouldn't be collectible. I've actually told you that that would have been MORE expensive to get a playset that way, and it wouldn't have been any less random by the box. And if "I can buy a playset all at once and know exactly what I'm getting" is the definition of non-collectible, then by the box we are definitely non-collectible.
It's non-collectible by the box, which is ALL that we really claim.
If non-collectibility involves a price point, then keep in mind that two of our starter decks are cheaper than the two player price point for Blue Moon. And that Blue Moon plus all 9 expansions has fewer cards than we do (though larger cards) and costs more money for the full Blue Moon set than one box of draft packs and 2 starters for our game (also a full tournament viable set).
You guys seem convinced that somehow if we'd printed them differently things would have been cheaper. They wouldn't have been. My example of Blue Moon makes just that comparison fewer (but larger) cards, in lots of separate decks, costs the same or more than producing the game and packaging it the way we did.
And if we'd done it any other way, we would have lost the ability to have draft tournaments starting in a few weeks, which is a fun mode of play.