- The brother said that they are "just cards" and didn't see why people were making such a huge fuss about them.

Wow well that just proves they were in the game just to cash in. How do you expect to have people back your product and eventually make a profit if you don't take your own product seriously? I saw their video and also thought they were arrogant and completely unprofessional. It doesn't mean they couldn't of made a goofy video. But if they did it with proper quality and approached it professionally they probably wouldn't of gotten the reaction they did.

Luckily, KS backers weed out the rotten apples.

Honestly, kickstarter wasn't really a hassle. The website as a whole could be better organized but overall it wasn't as horrible as it originally seemed. Luckily for me this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to running a business as this is the 2nd company I founded and am currently running, so putting in the work wasn't new. It was the prep which was the hassle as this was a first for me in this field.

Rewards are without a doubt a gimmick but in they end they could pay off, literally. It's all marketing. Sure you go to McDonald's for those tastey nuggets and Big Mac, but what's an extra $1 for that collectible cup?  You don't go there for the cup (in most cases) you go there for the food, but it's the marketing of that add on which pushes you to put out that extra $1. Look at my Grid campaign, if I sold just the deck, the kickstarter would've maxed out at approx. $40k, (and I was selling decks starting at $7/8, which i believe is one of the cheapest KS decks) but I raised over $47k and broke some records. I'm sure others like Brimstone and Revisions could of done the same, if not more, but they only focused on the cards. Which is absolutely fine. But if you would enjoy seeing some decent profit, which is usually the point of any startup no matter how much you enjoy producing the product, you have to put in the work and work some marketing.

As for the Gaffs, I am going to look into it for our upcoming deck. Time to do some digging.

I would definitely love to see kickstarter more organized in that manner. Helps when keeping track of rewards and with backers being able to find a pledge level they are looking for instead of having to scroll through endless rewards.

I've been following this deck like everyone else and I too was skeptical considering the licensing. Sure there's decks that exist that bare similarities or are inspired by other intellectual properties. The Grid is an example of how a product can receive skepticism due to its similarity to existing properties. This is ok to do as long as you dont feature someone elses designs/product. The Core deck on kickstarter is also a good example. Its inspired by Iron Man and has his core reactor. However, he doesnt feature Iron Man nor the actual core reactor, the creator designed his own core reactor. In copyrighting a product, you can only copyright the design and execution of the product, NOT the idea. You can make a chair with your own design and take on the chair but you cant get sued by the creator of the chair just because it has a backing, seating and four legs. Those are the ideas which bring it together, but not the design and execution. Now it's tough when you have a product and say you have no affiliations to an IP then actually feature the IP as your product. There's no way you're going to avoid the proper legal leg work. I work in the motion picture industry and have had my fair share of dealing with IPs. It's no easy matter.

However, from the looks of things, this project was removed, not cancelled. When someone cancels a project on kickstarter the page can not be deleted. It just remains there but says the funding was cancelled. This project however, simply vanished with no trace. It appears it was taken down directly by kickstarter. If this was a legal issue, My assumption is Lego's legal team contacted kickstarter directly for a cease and desist. Kickstarter has to approve your project before it goes live, so they obviously saw the property and took their word for it and went live. Then here comes Lego, "blocking" the project. See what I did there lol sorry I couldn't help it.

I'm anxious to hear what the creators have to say about the ordeal.

With 2 hours left in the campaign, we completely SOLD OUT of The Grid! Actually sold more than expected at the last minute that I had to dip into my own personal stock. Isn't that something? I almost had to buy MY OWN set of decks from a reseller lol.

4pm, welcome to the Discourse.


I'm glad to hear that you're aiming for USPC to put this deck together.  Now, if you do, will you be going for a "branded" deck - "Bicycle Grid", or something to that effect?

We will more than likely go with our original tuck cover design which has the bicycle title in the font and style of where THE GRID title stands. With THE GRID title being listed just above "playing cards" in place of the title "poker"

Hello everybody. I'm the designer at 4PM DESIGNS and wanted to drop by and thank everyone for their support of our deck THE GRID.

There's been a lot of talk about the printing of the deck and the why and why nots. Hopefully I can clear things up. This being our first deck we originally designed the decks with the USPCC in mind throughout its development. Which is why there are still lingerings of that design in its current form. However, we ended up losing contact with the USPCC for one reason or another. We began looking for another suitable printer who can deliver our deck in the time span we were looking for since we hadn't heard back from USPCC for well over a week. Could of been a mix up or server problems, but we couldn't continue waiting with no reply. This wasn't a decision of one company over another, it was simply a timing issue. It had nothing to do with pricing.

Ironically enough, the same day we launched our kickstarter we ended up receiving an email from the USPCC about the deck. That, along with the huge response to printing, lead us to immediately start working with the USPCC again and we are now waiting on proofs of the deck. However, since we just launched the site with the previous printing prices in mind, we updated the site to let everyone know if we can reach a goal of $10,000 we can go forward with the USPCC. Going through the USPCC does indeed cost us a little more and we are expecting less of a pay back but we'd rather release a quality product that'll make our customers happy. We definately believe in quality over quantity and we hope everyone will enjoy this deck. Your voices are being heard.

Thank you all for your continued support!