Kickstarter - The Elves Deck - Fantasy Playing Cards

[friscards]

Hello everyone, I and my partner Lene are about to launch a campaign about fantasy playing cards  .

I have been collecting cards since I was a kid and have been buying recent decks for many years as well, to study what's out there. At some point I had the chance of meeting a famous creator of playing cards Gio of Thirdway Industries. He was super nice and explained me how he does his decks and how to start my own project. With his help we have worked for around a year and came up with the idea of a deck of playing cards about Elves as we both love fantasy and playing cards.

Our promo message is as follow, and hopefully you'll like and support our project




If you like Elves, Fantasy, RPG and Playing Cards, this project is for you! ♥️♣️♦️♠️
It's a fabulous deck with 52 custom playing cards, and would be printed by USPCC on Premium Bee Stock.
KICKSTARTER has approved our project and we will go live on October 18th at 18:00 CET.

Sign up for notifications to get updated and don't miss this wonderful deck !

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/friscards/the-elves-deck/

also check our instagram too if you want:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUsP6ybo0mq/

PS: sorry about the image size, not sure how to post it smaller ^^, if that is a problem I will edit and try to make it work otherwise but I also think the bigger the more details you can see

[Don Boyer]

Sory that I'm late to the game on this reply.

Hey, your project - it looks like it has great artwork in it and is a pretty solid-looking design - but at the same time, it looks like you canceled it because...well, no reason is given on the project page, so I'm guessing it was due to not getting enough interest in your project to hit the goal.

Consider a few ideas here.

* Elves aren't exactly new territory in playing cards, especially in recent years with the explosion of custom decks.  Maybe the subject is just too well-trodden to be of interest?  At the least, a generic take on elves might not do it for backers - if you had elves based on a specific storyline from an author or a movie (and obtained the legal rights to use those characters, places, etc.), you might get more people on-board.  Look at "The Name of the Wind."  Very popular book, turned into a huge hit of a campaign.  In other words, maybe you need more of a hook to catch people's attention and bring them in as backers.  Anything that makes your elf deck stand out from the crowd would do it.  I saw the photos you had in your campaign of people dressed in elven costumes - why not model your entire deck that way, telling the story of you and your elf-loving friends who get together and cosplay or LARP their hearts out over their love of elves?  I knew a guy who made a stellar deck, White Knuckle Playing Cards, by using personal friends and acquaintances as models for a more realistic depiction of the court cards in his deck.  It's one of my favorite decks to this day.

* Printing by USPC is a great thing - but it's also among the more expensive options out there.  Have you considered a quality printer that isn't so top-dollar?  If you can lower your printing costs, you can make your campaign a success.  I often recommend MakePlayingCards.com (MPC) to people because of how flexible they are with print run size - you can print as little as a single deck, and I know many designers use them for making demo decks before having their projects printed by one of the other, most expensive printers.  Over the years, they have dramatically improved their quality - it's not perfect, but for the price, it's not bad at all.  I've seen projects with goals as low as US$1,000 by using such a printer, and they almost invariably succeed, especially with art on par to yours.  Short version of this would be: set the bar lower before taking off for the high jump.

* How far and wide did you go to promote your project?  I know people who crawl the width and breadth of the internet when promoting their projects - and the more legwork you do, the more people will know about you and your work.  Remember that I mentioned MPC above?  Get a short print run of demo decks made at your cost from MPC - a couple of hundred dollars worth would do it, something most people can do out of pocket - and get those decks into the hands of influencers and reviewers that have a following.

* A few bells and whistles are nice, to be sure, but go easy on the add-on doodads.  Dice and coins are popular, but coloring books?  Be careful not to make your project into a flea market.  I mentioned The Name of the Wind, above.  I know the man behind that project, the owner of Albino Dragon.  He had so many add-ons for his project, it was a royal headache to keep track of them all and the cost to produce them seriously ate into his bottom line on the project.  K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple, Stupid! 

[friscards]

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 .

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