I noticed some of my pokemon cards had shot up in value recently, as pretty much all commodities are doing lately by the looks of it.
It got me thinking how lame/weird it is that there's a whole market and companies in existence in this day and age based on the quality of a card print. Now, I'm not saying I'd do things better or that high grade printing factories can be improved or that I'd know much about that, but you'd think a multi-billion dollar company printing cards that sell out everywhere almost instantly and are literally pushing themselves to meet demands would be able to do some quality assurance here and there.
That said, grading companies like PSA have also started to become more stricter in recent years. When I sent out my pokemon 151 series cards to be graded, it was a lot harder to get a 10 score than it was before that time.
I've talked about some of these things before and how I'd do things differently, especially when it comes to serializing each card so people can verify it's the one they own and get back from grading companies or other middlemen that may hold your cards for a while for whatever reason. As this leaves the leeway for abuse where card switching can happen, i.e. someone hands you an identical card that isn't looking like it can score a better grade than the one you have.
Anyway, I wanted to write a little about some things I've thinking about as of late along with how to proceed in the case that we'd start printing physical cards for our game in the future.
I had this idea of a digital-first process to cards.
If you're an up and coming franchise looking to create physical cards, the starter barriers can be quite high in terms of cost and the amount of bulk they want processed before they can take your order seriously. I.e. you can't just do "test runs" with only say 5-10k cards and see if you wanna order more later. This means that for many niche games and communities card printing is quite impossible, especially at the quality levels you'd require along with features such as texcture, layers, etc.
So my solution could be more in line where say, if we have an app and engine where collectors can buy digital packs and open their cards up in the digital world, eventually if they'd hit a certain milestone/target, they'd have the possibility to pay extra for having their cards printed physically. This would naturally require that the digital packs are a bit more expensive starting out to be able to cover the printing expenses, but it would also give us an idea on demand which is what would make it a harder investment if we'd set out to print 50-100k cards which is usually the minimum requirements on the higher end quality printing services.
Along with referrals and a goal set, people would understand that we wouldn't be able to offer physical cards unless at least 100k digital cards have been generated, so it could be another way to "crowdfund/source" it into existence and you as the creator wouldn't need to create unnecessary bulk as you'd know exactly which cards you'd need created looking at the nfts existing in every collector.
Another thing I feel like is for some reason being completely ignored in the current card space is uniqueness to the artwork as an additional layer of rng/rarity.
There's clearly a demand from players to make some of their common cards feel more rare, as we've seen with "swirls" in holo layered cards:
So when collectors receive basic energy cards they look out to see if there's some unique swirls, error swirls or the sheer amount of swirls in the cards to set them apart from the common ones that may only have 3-4 swirls. Yet Pokemon has pretty much discontinued this practice instead of making it a feature which is kind of a missed opportunity in my book.
I don't mean it needs to be something like this uncontrollable side-effect like swirls either, but planned and weighted randomness in unique colors, additions, differences in artwork.
Take for instance one of the newest @holozing fanart created by @solumviz:
Now let's say we'd place her in the digital and physical card design and you get lucky and receive the diamond foil card:
This would still only give you a few differentials between a typ-card rarity (green/blue/yellow/red) or gold/diamond. In physical form you'd then have to rely on grading it, which most of the time depends on the quality checks at the factory rather than how well you took care and stored the card. Why not add more?
Let's say, there's a 10% chance she can be generated with holo colors in her hair, let's say there's a 2% additional random chance that her eye color is blue instead of yellow, 2% for green, 0.1% for heterochromia where her eyes have different color from one another. Maybe 10% chance for a different colored outfit, x% chance for a different background, x% chance for a different colored camera, x% chance for a different picture being printed from the camera, etc.
This in and of itself, easy and small changes give for countless amount of variations to the art giving collectors a wide range of uniqueness and making rare variations stand out in different ways, where a card with the rarest foil, rarest eye colors, rarest hair color, rarest clothing colors, rarest camera color and rarest image on the camera having a 0.000x% chance thus giving it true scarcity. Rather than "oh is it PSA 10? okay cool".
Anyway, this is something I've been looking forward to building, how we go about it will of course depend on funding which isn't looking too great lately, but hopefully hive gets its shit together in the near future or that some of our core functionalities like the game finally gets finished so we can start looking for funding again once people are re-assured that there really is something here and it can grow.