Hello Don, thanks so much for your kind words and nice ideas!
You are right, we canceled, and it was because we launched at a very difficult time, when there were like 15 or more other projects of playing cards at the same time and also, we hadn't prepared properly our promotional campaign, as you wisely noticed.
We are the actors as well as the creators of the project, so you actually saw us in the video, we did the cosplay for fun and to make the project look real, we used our faces and tried to make a fun video to show the theme and the cards. Two of the playing cards of the project actually feature our faces, so we somewhat did what you mentioned in your idea. However, we don't have a real community of cosplayer friends. so it would become a little difficult to have more people dressed up and would also be complicated to re-draw the cards for this reason
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We spoke with some of the backers as well as with some other creators and we have had a lot of nice feedback and ideas. And we are following through with those comments as well.
You are absolutely right about the prototypes and in fact, we just had two decks manufactured to have a general idea, already noticed a few things to tweak and we'll have the cards reprinted again. When we have a prototype that looks 100% right, we will indeed manufacture around 10 decks and send it to selected influencers, youtube reviewers, photographers, and people who'd generally be able to create interest and make some noise about the cards.
We looked into doing some officially licensed product but it was very complex so we created our story ourselves, and hopefully, people would be interested in the story and the elves as well. Except for the name of the wind and a few other fantasy-oriented decks, we didn't find too many decks of this genre and since we love fantasy and RPG, we went along with it. it's the world we know best.
We will also make fewer promotional items connected to the campaign but for sure we'll keep the coins and dice as they indeed usually are liked by collectors. We might skip the rest and keep it simple indeed.
We finally are revising the tuck box to have it more competitive but we truly would want to print at USPCC, to make our first deck epic and memorable. We believe in the project and will do everything in our power to make it happen.
Thanks so much for your kind reply and we'd love to have your support.
Fede and Lene
PS: you can see some initial promo photos for the prototype on our instagram: @friscards