I didn’t set out to make a click-baity title, but I couldn’t think of any good alliterations to go with treasure or doubloons. And before anyone gets too excited, this article is about pirate booty, the kind that comes in gold and jewels and blockchain assets.
Collectible cards have a certain kind of magic. I’ve known that ever since I was a kid. I’ll never forget the thrill of ripping open a pack of Pokemon cards and finding a shiny Zapdos. It was as if the legendary bird’s electricity had been mainlined into my veins. I’ll never forget finding an Avatar of Woe in a Magic booster pack. My very own rare card, something about which I felt immense pride. I’ll never forget the rush of cracking open Kaiba’s starter deck and flipping through a stack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards for the first time. It was a moment of pure representation, as I too am blue-eyed and a dragon.
Collectible cards have a certain kind of magic. What I didn’t know as a kid, however, was that collectible cards have a certain kind of dread. As a kid, it’s fun and exciting to get a deck as a birthday present, or to spend allowance on a booster pack. As an adult, it’s soul crushing to know that rent, bills, and loans can often make the choice between a cool piece of 2.5 x 3.5 inch piece of cardboard and literal food a difficult one.
As I got older, my appreciation for the depths of card game mechanics grew. Unfortunately, my appreciation for the lack of depths in my pockets grew at a similar rate. If you plot the two on the same graph, you’d wind up with a big X, except this X definitely does not mark the spot. There are so many cool cards, so many awesome combos, so many fun decks that I wanted to make. Now that money was part of the equation, though, a lot of that fun went away. When money gets involved, magic seems to pack its bags and head out. Another X shaped graph, and yet that mythical spot is still unmarked.
By the time Here Be Monsters was becoming less of a weird hobby for Carson and I and more of an actual product that we wanted to pursue creating, we obviously had to talk about money. Luckily, Carson and I have been on the same page about this from the get-go. We didn't find it fun to churn through hundreds of dollars in hopes that we'd randomly find that one card that we needed in a booster pack, and similarly it wasn't fun to churn through hundreds of dollars buying that one card that we needed from some card-game-kingpin on eBay. If we were going to make a game with collectible cards, we were going to do everything in our power to make the game affordable for players.
We threw a lot of ideas at the wall, but the one that stuck was the idea of 'half-crews'. Instead of randomized booster packs (packs that are basically 90% chaff and 10% rare/shiny chaff) we decided we would sell fully transparent/consistent sets of cards - 'half-crews' (for those who prefer pirate terminology). Each half-crew will contain a specific collection of cards that you’ll always know about before you click “Buy” (and select all the images that don’t contain a traffic light). All you need to play the game is two half-crews that you can slap together and you've got a full crew (or deck). Or if you want to build something from scratch, you can pick and choose cards from all of your half-crews and make something completely new! Gone are the days of breaking open your piggy bank with a hammer and emptying out its contents just so you can buy that one card. We want anyone to be able to build any deck they want without causing too much injury to Hamm from Toy Story.
But wait, you say. You started out this whole thing by pontificating on the magic of opening up a pack of cards and marveling at what you pulled. For a game whose bedrock is nostalgic fun, you sure are doing a lot of bedrock fracking. Slow down there, amigo, and put your pitchforks away. We know that half of the fun of collectible card games is, well, collection. Playing the game is awesome, but so is opening packs. This is why we came up with the idea of Stowaway Cards.
Stowaway Cards are extra, randomized cards that exist in half-crews. They’re fun reprints of existing cards, either with fun new art, wacky text, or shiny foils. Functionally, they’re identical to their standard counterparts. Paying through the nose to amass Stowaway Cards won’t give you any competitive edge. For those who don’t give a rat’s booty about collections, you can ignore them and focus on whichever crews will allow you to build your perfect deck. For those who do care, though, they offer a whole new way to engage with the game. Like a particular artist? Try to collect all of their pirates! Like a particular pirate code? Try to get as many foils of that color as you can. Like Feral Coconaut? Try to be the first person in the world to collect 10,000 copies of Feral Coconaut! However you like to play, our hope is that Stowaway Cards will offer plenty of collectible fun while still living harmoniously with our crew-based plan to keep the base game financially accessible to everyone.
Mind you, we’re still far enough away from launch that everything is subject to change, but our primary plan is that each half-crew will come with three Stowaway Cards. But if you want to dive fully into the collecting space, we will probably offer a full Stowaway box that's similar to a booster box. With this you can get all the Stowaway Cards you'd like! Enjoy the hunt!
We think we’ve found a pretty good intersection of not breaking the bank, but still having fun collecting, and that intersection feels, to us, to be something of a treasure. After all, as they say, X marks the spot.
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