We actually just brought on two more people to help with this. Patrick Connor, our communications director begins full time work today! He's actually flying in to Dallas right now. We also brought on a part time web designer who has been steadily improving the speed of the site. You should see more changes starting this next week!

You know, it is a possibility, that we could sell singles. But I'll need to talk to my web team, sales team, and customer service department to make sure that if we did roll it out, it would go smooth, and that we'd be able to handle the orders in a timely manner. We'd also need to do some research with our retailers to make sure it wouldn't be perceived as not supporting them. Overall though, I'll ask my team to start looking into it and see what we can dig up.

Great feedback guys. We've definitely heard this concern and we're trying our best to find a good compromise. Here's the situation as I see it:

1. As we've said before, we're trying hard to mitigate the number of unique cards we want in the game vs. the number of repeats. Basically, the idea is that if we give you a "full set" of cards, that means including less different unique cards, which means taking the options away from most sets, which means releasing more sets, which means you guys having to spend more money. We wanted a longer lasting product. Very rarely in our playtest sessions did we see Mages using 4-6 of one card multiple times. Perhaps with one or two cards if your strategy depended on it, but oftentimes in games it was more prudent to have one or two copies of multiple cards on the off chance that you needed to counter your opponent.

2. A "full set" in actuality, wouldn't technically be full, it would be full for one mage. Meaning, since six copies is the maximum that you can have of level one spells, and four of everything else - if we gave you six minor heals - that wouldn't really be a full set, it would just be the maximum that one mage would be allowed to have in his spellbook. Most players, we're hearing, are building multiple mages from the core set, either for themselves or for their friends and family. Our goal with the Core Set was to give enough variety in the new game to allow players to see what Mage Wars was really capable of, and how many different options there were in the game. We were afraid that limiting the number of options and opting for a "full" set would decrease what players would be able to do, and as such, decrease their enjoyment of the game.

3. Now, the potential solution would be to sell "full set" mages. Meaning, you go buy a priestess spellbook, and it's one complete priestess set. Again, you'd still have some of the uniqueness problem, but maybe less so depending on how many cards we release. But still, you're looking at paying something like $30 for one Mage, as opposed to $60 for four. Also, this is bad for retailers, in the situation where a particular mage doesn't sell well in their area, they still have to stock it, but then it just sits there forever because their store is heavy into warlocks and necromancers, but not so much into priestesses, etc. This also raises the barrier for entry for new players, as they'll have to buy a couple sets to get a feel for the right mages,

4. We even talked about releasing smaller sets, say with 30 cards, but each set was complete. Say 10 cards at level 1, gives us 60 cards - and then the other 20 were above level one, giving us the other 80 cards. That would cost in stores around $20 (like the Core Spell Tomes), and we could release maybe one of those a month - in fact, that would even be more profitable for us on our end. But it felt too much like the collectible market that we didn't want to get into, we really wanted to release a big robust game with a lot of different options in one set. However, to release a Core Set with a full set of all the cards we wanted to offer, would've contained about 800 cards or so - and even then, that would only have been complete for one mage.

The best I can really say is that we're constantly aware of this back and forth compromise that we have to do, and moving forward we're trying our best to find a better solution. As we saw with the CST1, we tried our best to guess which cards players would find the most useful - however, we learned that there were still a lot of cards from the Core Set that players wanted access too - so we took the feedback and released the CST2. It's possible we'll move to a model where expansions don't come with spellbooks, so we may be able to release more cards - or maybe we'll release expansions with the same number of unique cards, and then release CST's with more complete sets afterwards once players have an idea of which cards they want copies of. Right now, running a singles store online for us wouldn't be the greatest support of the retailers - but as time goes on it might be something we'd be able to revisit.

But again, thanks for the feedback, we're always listening and we're always trying to improve!

Awesome, this is great feedback. From what I'm hearing it looks like these would be huge steps to helping out our community here at magewars.com

1. Get forum exclusive spoilers: content you can't find on BGG and on Facebook
2. Regularly updated news content, maybe on a week to week basis, and possibly before it goes out to the other social venus
3. More designer thoughts: strategy guides, breakdowns of why and how the game was created the way it was, and updates on when products will be released, etc.

The big, big thing though sounds like: make it exclusive to this one particular place.

Honestly, the reason we've had so much focus on Facebook is largely to do with the fact that we have a large community there, and it's been relatively easy to pump out small amounts of content on a daily or weekly basis. However, with a full-time Communications guy coming on board, this should be relatively no problem to have updated content on both BGG, the Forums, and Facebook and have there be specific targeted information for each one. I'd love to not have such a fractured presence, but each of those portals reaches a different mindset and a different consumer base. For instance, I believe we found most of our early International fans through Boardgamegeek, most of our fans we meet at tradeshows stop by Facebook first (where they're adding all the friends they met at a specific con), and, like you guys mentioned, our most competitive players (and oftentimes future playtesters), come to the forums. So, they are generally different crowds with some crossover.

However, if I'm hearing you guys right - we will get on all of this stuff immediately. Thanks again for being so great with feedback!

Thanks for the feedback - I totally agree, we need to revitalize some of the information here on the website. We are currently working on revamping the front page, and we've just hired a communications director whose job will be to make sure the website is constantly current with new information - helping release more designer notes and strategy guides, etc. So, definitely look forward to that.

I'm almost positive "duplicate" does not mean "can only copy once" in this instance, but let me double check.

Sleep! A great spell!