Thanks Shadow! Great questions guys.
Mage wars was made from the ground up by gamers for gamers. We did not want to be collectible, and wanted to be a very affordable game for everyone. We truly do not want players having to buy anything extra. And, if you do, we want to make it efficient and affordable.
We realize there is a growing demand for more copies of some of the cards. We are working hard on the best, most practical solution. Let me give you some background information, and then please comment and give us your opinion.
When we designed the Core Spell Tome we put a copy of 104 unique spells in there, with only 6 duplications of very common spells.
The main game has 322 spells, of which 174 are unique. This means the Core Spell Tome does not contain 70 of the main game spells.
Because cards are printed in sheets of 110, we could only include 110 cards total. The choices were extremely tough! In the end, we chose to not duplicate anything Legendary or Epic, as well as some of the bigger more expensive spells, and also many equipment items, of which you could only have 1 in play at a time. Extra Fireball or extra Staff of Asyra?!
Here are a few solutions we are looking at, and we'd love your thoughts on this:
2nd Core Spell Tome
This new Core Spell Tome has the other 70 spells not included in the first tome (1 copy of each). Then, it would have 40 other spells, which would be duplicated by the first spell tome, and we would probably select additional copies of the most common spells to help beef those up better.
In this manner, if you bought both tomes, you'd have an extra copy of every spell in the game, plus 2-3 copies of the most common cards.
If the demand is there, we could put this together and have it in stores in 6-8 weeks. Printing here in the USA really helps! (Otherwise this product would be 3 months away.)
Single Spells Shop
We could setup a single spell shop on our website, allowing players to buy just the cards they need. In order to cover the costs of the shop (with a physical location and labor to package orders) the cards would naturally cost more than if you bought 110 at a time in a Core Spell Tome. However, the advantage would be you could buy just the ones you want/need and keep the total cost down.
This shop would more than likely take up to 3 months to setup - we'd be looking at January 2013.
As much as possible we want to sell through, work through, and support the game stores. We could sell huge spell packs to retailers who also want to establish a singles shop in their store, so they could do this affordably.
Mage Booster Tome
We could produce a separate tome for each Mage. This tome has all the spells that Mage would typically want to use, with lots of copies of the level one spells. For example, the Warlock pack would ensure you'd have enough spells, so that with the main game, you'd have 4 Fireballs, 6 Flameblasts, 6 Firebarand Imps, and 2 Hellfire Lashes, etc.
Players could get everything they want and need for one Mage. The problem with this option is that there are 4 separate products here, which are a lot for players to purchase and collect, if they want to boost all the Mages.
Also, we are a little concerned that retailers may not want 4 separate SKUs on their shelves, which may make this an online only product. This goes against our "sell through the retailer plan", but is still worth considering if the player demand is in this direction.
Like the 2nd Core Spell Tome, we could have these available in 6-8 weeks.
Thanks in advance for your input and suggestions!
