I know we're a little late to add things to the kickstarter, but I was wondering if there was a possibility of >G releasing additional promo decks (either a new hero, villain, or environment) as an A La Carte option?
I'm not sure how much Unity/Ambuscade generate vs how much they cost to produce, but surely there is at least some margin to them?
Introducing a purchase-only (ie not a stretch reward) promo deck could get people to chip in a little more and push us toward that $150k mark.
As of right now, we have 1731 backers. If each current backer upped their pledge by $10 (to buy a bonus promo hero and a bonus promo villain), we would be less than $15k away from the goal. If a purchase-only promo environment was introduced as well (with all current backers upping their pledge by $15 to buy all three new items), we would be a little more than $5k short of the goal, which could be easily achieved considering we get 20-40 new backers per day on average.
Thoughts? Would this be logistically feasible? Does >G even have content close enough to ready that they could use to do this?
I think it's unlikely to work. I don't recall the specifics, but I think >G may actually have made a loss on Unity and Ambuscade, despite the $5 cost for Unity.
Is there some way to make it work? Perhaps, but I doubt that they could do it for $5 for a hero deck. It might have to be $7 or even $10 for a deck.
Yeah, I felt bad for them losing money on Unity and Ambuscade, and that's why I'm making sure to up my pledge by $5 for each of them, even though they're free. We don't want more losses!
I'm not 100% sure on it, but I thought this time they actually planned it better so that way they had the promos actually balance out this time around? Or am I imaginaing reading things again, since I tend to do that.
You have to figure that this time around they will be printing a lot more of the promo decks as compared to the previous kickstarters (as of right now there are 1735 backers, relics/enhanced only had 1197), so the whole economies of scale thing would kick in and they would be cheaper for them to produce than unity or ambuscade. If only marginally.
But I definitely would back a new hero deck or two.
I seriously doubt that they lose money with a 5$ deck that they send in the same package they send the expansion. If that were the case, selling 8 decks (2 heroes, 2 events and 4 villains) for 20$ (that's half the price they sell the a la carte decks, not counting the box) that's what brings and cost an expansion will have left them in total bankrupcy 2 expansions ago. I´m pretty sure that the a la carte decks and promo cards are giving them a good profit.
In fact that's the reason why I don´t like this idea. My inside collector freak had made me pay those 10$ for those 2 decks to have every deck avaliable, but I´m not making this an habit because that's overpaying them, paying twice their price within an expansion.
The cost of a standalone deck is more than the cost of a deck that is part of a package. I'm not sure which parts of the printing and packaging cost how much, but consider that when packaging multiple decks, they can be bundled together. Also, probably far fewer of the standalone decks will be distributed/sold, so >G probably has to choose either between printing lots of decks that they won't be able to sell or doing a separate print run, which means incurring the fixed cost of the print run.
I don´t know how they package them, but I don´t think that wrap them up with plastic coud be a major cost, and I don´t know how much copies of each expansion they print, but knowing that every kickstarter backer will have one, and they want some extra to sell apart or in future promotions, it would not seem too strange to me to hear that they print they in the same sheet they print the expansion.
I know that print a la carte decks is more expensive, and I don´t know the details and can be wrong, but you will need hard data to convince me that they lose money selling for 5$ decks like the ones that makes them earn money selling for 2.5$ because that would mean almost 3x usual cost. But even being the case, that's just another reason why it´s not a good idea to sell decks a la carte for 5$. If printing them a la carte is so expensive, just don´t do it, gather a bunch of them and give us another expansion at reasonable price.
I also do not like the $5 no set extra decks, as I've mentioned before. Now, I wouldn't be against a mini expansion (something along the lines of an extra hero deck and two villain decks, or maybe a hero deck, and environment deck, and a villain deck) for $10 or so, or maybe a micro expansion (hero and villain deck) for $7.50 - $8, for some decks that maybe don't fit a theme, or even as an extra promotional set released alongside an official themed set. But, I feel $5 is a bit much to pay for a deck (of which I only purchased last time because I didn't want to be minus a deck). A replacement deck, I can understand, but a new deck that just wasn't given in a package. no.