Open Letter about Brazil's situation

Dear players, store owners, and everyone involved in VtES,

I feel that this letter has been necessary for some time now, especially after the latest releases from Conclave. I am a store owner in Brasília, and I started working with (and playing) VtES in 2021, when the first V5 decks were arriving in Brazil. Since then, I’ve noticed several issues that, in my opinion, are preventing the game from growing — and these problems have only been getting worse.

The first issue is how the game is sold and distributed. Today, we basically have two official ways to purchase cards: through Márcio Pinheiro, who, according to Black Chantry, is the official distributor of English cards in Brazil; or through Conclave, which officially translates and sells the cards in Portuguese.

Let’s start with the distribution of English cards: although Márcio is the official distributor, he acts as a retailer for the final customer and does not serve — or at least not adequately serve — stores in Brazil. The prices he offers to retailers and to the final consumer are the same, which makes it unfeasible for stores to work with the English product. This may seem great for players, who can buy cards at a lower price, but in terms of visibility and community growth, it’s terrible. Stores should function as showcases and gathering spaces for the local community, but they are being completely left aside by the official distributor here in Brazil.

Now, regarding Conclave, it’s no surprise that the company has been falling short lately. When I made my first purchases from them, there was nothing to complain about — either as a store or as a player. They delivered the products within the proposed timeframe and included stores in their pre-sales. As for the product itself, it was of good quality since it was printed by Copag, a reputable company here in Brazil.

But then the problems started: there were months of delay in delivering the Companion and New Blood decks, and to make matters worse, the quality was far below expectations (more details below). We had several customers complaining about missing cards, and the overall product quality was inferior to previous releases.

As a store owner, I was also very disappointed by another issue: the total exclusion of stores from the pre-sales of the bundles and the first New Blood releases in Brazil. After the pre-sale ended, I had to insist for them to even sell me New Blood decks — products that are supposedly targeted at new players. What I feel is a total disregard for the few stores that still try to support the game.

A good example of this is the promotional cards, which in my view should be used for events, but are instead given as gifts to customers who buy directly from Conclave — and even sold directly to anyone. Stores receive no kind of support or incentive to sell the products or organize events, giving the impression that Conclave doesn’t care about retailers at all.

But I believe we’ve crossed the line with this latest batch — the Sabbat decks. As both a player and a store owner, I felt completely disrespected by the terrible quality of the product that was delivered. The cards came damaged straight from the factory (in some cases, over 50%), with printing issues such as color misalignment, low resolution, bad cutting, and poor paper quality. To be honest, I felt like I was opening a counterfeit product rather than an official VtES deck. It shows a total lack of respect toward the players/customers and the game as a whole to allow a product like that to reach the market.

In short, I feel that the game is not being treated with the seriousness it deserves here. I see very few — almost no — stores in Brazil working with VtES, while other card games that hit the market explode in popularity thanks to full retailer support. Other TCGs have store-exclusive products, event kits with promos, banners, flyers, and official promotion through websites and apps.

Meanwhile, VtES seems to be deliberately kept within a small clique, where new players need to be “initiated” by veterans. I see almost no effort from Conclave, Márcio, or Black Chantry to promote the game broadly, bring it into stores, and help local communities grow here in Brazil.

Vitor Guedes

P.S. — Timeline of Conclave’s Issues:

Delays in product arrivals in Brazil
NB 2022 and Companion 2023 were initially expected to release only in October 2024.
NB and Companion launches were pushed back to Jan/Feb 2025.
Card material was changed without prior notice to retailers or players.


Release of Hecata, NB Lasombra, and NB Hecata
Stores had to beg to join the pre-sale, which had already begun for end customers.
The Hecata Crypt was released without background art, resulting in players returning the product to Conclave.


Sabbat
Factory-damaged cards.

Just wow, this is an absolute disgrace, are they trying to make the cards look vintage with that damage? Looks like no QA at all. And given that Brazil is, I think, the biggest market / community, treating retailers like that is a joke. At this point, BCP should intervene.

This letter perfectly captures the frustration many of us in the VtES community have been feeling. The lack of retailer support, product quality control, and communication from both Conclave and the official distributor seriously harm the game’s potential to grow in Brazil . Vitor’s points are fair, detailed, and deserve an official response from Black Chantry.

This is not perhaps the best way to communicate with us by spamming email addresses, reddit, VEKN forum, paradox.

I cannot help you with your problems if you do not tell me about them - i will have a look at the letter but usurpingly I will need to ask for all the evidence concerns in a useful manner i.e. via email and then put each of your concerns back to the distributor in question.

I also feel i need to reexplain some key points:
we have currently:
* Conclave, printing locally in Portuguese, they did order one large lot in English early on but have found it difficult to import in which is why we have local translation in the first place along with all of Fernando's hard work.
* Marcio orders something like 60-100 of each set and we have a couple of other small buyers but with shipping, tax and rate of return (x% of shipments seem to get rejected by customs ) it is small, slow and expensive - that's literally the reason why the price he is receiving it stops it being suitable for mass retail, it isn't designed to make profit just get it there.
This replaced Fernando doing this who just transported stock in a suitcase.
* We do have a store or more perhaps ordering via our US distributor which seems to be cheaper as they might be able to buy in bulk and they hopefully have a better rate/success sending into Brazil and people

If you have a way to order bulk/mass distribution from Europe into Brazil that doesn't price it out of local players amounts happy to hear it.

Re:
KoRneeshon on size, Spain, US, Germany, buy more combined of your English + Portuguese, and i would have thought you're about 2% of English speaking sales.
Brazil is a much higher % of player base than sales and that's no doubt reflected in some of these issues.

Meanwhile, VtES seems to be deliberately kept within a small clique, where new players need to be “initiated” by veterans. I see almost no effort from Conclave, Márcio, or Black Chantry to promote the game broadly, bring it into stores, and help local communities grow here in Brazil.

You mean, like basically every other card game working at the same financial level in the industry? Compare this to all the other games working being reborn from nothing like Netrunner or Universal Fighting System (now know as UniVersus), and you'll see it's the same issues. BCP is fighting upstream against BanDai, Konami, FFG, and of course WoTC. It doesn't help either that their own community is constantly trying to loudly and publicly berate the work being done on the game every step of the way.

Also, do some homework on companies that produce CCG products. The market is incredibly toxic and broken. Unless you can order at the big boy levels, you get your product when they decide it's your turn.

Either way though, as someone who ran a game store before, this is distribution black list behavior and this would often be enough to lose your rights to distribute. It's not likely it will based on the size of BCP, but hopefully the damage you caused in negligible at best.

That explains a thing or two, I wasn't aware of such "import" issues. I still think that it requires some attention.

BTW, it's not "mine English + Portuguese" and I'm probably not "2% English speaking sales" - I'm a happy customer from Poland and I enjoy VtES distribution to be really organized well here, that's why I was surprised that these things could go so bad elsewhere. Also, the discrepancy between player base size and sales size is a bit surprising, I guess they resort to using proxy much more.