Blog

Ry Schueller

Face front, true believer!

For this week’s ‘very OP blog’ feature I’d like to chat briefly about the promo card selection process. Everything ranging from foil cards at your local Battleground to your Top 8 prize at World Championships is all something that is part of my responsibilities as a member of the OP Team here at Cryptozoic Entertainment. A big component of making big regional events like Darkmoon Faires successful, is making sure that players are excited about the cards that they can acquire by attending, volunteering, or succeeding at these events.

How do you pick those wonderful cards?

Despite what many of you believe, we don’t have a dart board anywhere in our Irvine office.

I reach out to a number of groups when making card selections. The R&D team has been awesome about recommending cards to use for OP and Marketing programs, and our volunteers help give us a wide view of what our community wants. In addition, I spend more time than I ought to reviewing popular WoW TCG single card sites to see which cards are in demand.

I also look to decklists and coverage from events to see which cards are making Top 8 cut. If a card is showing up in multiple decks that are having success at big events, there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing a foil version of these cards in the future.

The tricky part is the card selection for these print runs are due sometimes six months (or more) before the events they’re needed for. If we choose cards from previous sets to far in the past we run the risk that the individual card choices won’t be legal very long in the Core Format, and if we choose unreleased cards to print as prizes we don’t have the information provided by our community as to what they want.

Extended Art vs Foils

I’ve seen this conversation pop up on the forums from time to time, or presented to me at events. Instead of ignoring the elephant in the room, I figured I’d open this up as a discussion topic too.

I personally like how Extended Art (EA) cards look, but doing Foil promo cards open up a lot of doors for us when deciding which cards to pick. Much like hero cards, EA cards require a different size of art to be commissioned so what is shown on a card can be cropped in two different ways. The concern with this is in the past after seeing the popularity of certain cards the cards we wanted to offer as prizes in OP programs didn’t have EA art, or the cards that were commissioned with EA art didn’t see competitive play.

Having the choice to make cards as foil promos gives our team access to pretty much every card ever made when printing promo cards, so we can make sure that the cards that players want can be considered as prizes in the future. Card text doesn’t need to be shrunk, so this is also better in a lot of ways when we want to consider certain cards for OP Programs.

Although… wouldn’t it be cool if there were Foil EA cards (like some if the cards from Archives) used as OP Prizes in the future? ::ponders silently for a moment::

Looking to the Future

We’re looking at doing more with promo card print runs in the future. Token of Justice and Holiday Celebration cards are one step in this direction, because it opens up game play exclusive cards that players earn from playing at events in their local stores.

As a special thanks to those who read to the end, here’s a small glimpse of the future:

(+5 DKP to every reader that knows where my opening line is from)