The future of V:TES

johannes wrote:

I will also look into the technical feasibility of changing the border color, it should remain dark I think, but probably some marbling or similar can be done. It depends if the border is embedded in the source image (don't think so) or was simply reached by black background plus the cutting stencil.

Rather than change the border color, why not use an additional "expansion" symbol somewhere on the card (or perhaps a new expansion symbol?) to note that this is a reprint and not from the original printing?

johannes wrote:

At the moment I have to agree with Izaak, keeping the current player base and re-activating lost players is probably the priority in the first step.

I agree with this. some may read it as "let's ignore recruiting new players" but I think it's the opposite. a game like VTES depends on keeping its current player base thriving before new players can even be added to the game.

with Magic or YuGiOh, you only need 1 friend playing the game to have incentive to buy some cards and play. if they quit, you just need 1 other player as a replacement. with VTES, it's hard to see what's so great about the game unless you have 3 other people to play it with. and that group has to stay at 4+ people or else all of them will stop playing VTES.

As much as many of us would like to buy directly the cards we need to build a deck, there is a simple problem: this way we'd buy diametrically less cards, hence the game would make much less profit, hence can't be distributed on this principle only. Starters are a great idea. Tin boxes would be great, but any "vintage" edition would be a real blessing. How about a "Gold edition", with a gold metallic symbol ?

@Diadalos: Without the need to print 'random boosters' the publishers would actually save money... less printing = less costs. So I'd say that on a the whole the profit-cost ratios should be approximately equal.

The Starters would be the deal-maker for allowing Princes to really expand their playerbases. The Tin Boxes might be a little difficult but there may be the option if/when they created some kind of collector set (or maybe as a prize for major tournaments such as 90 cards in a tin for winning a continental champs).

I'd be happy with "white border" for the reprints, but I'd really want the cards to have updated texts and backgrounds and if needed, updated artwork.

If you just print the cards that are actually useful, people will buy it if they're in random boosters. In the past, boosters were a risk because of the high amount of rare, but useless cards, if you take out those and only print the good, useful cards, I don't think it'll be a hard thing to sell.
The different edition symbol seems like a good idea, and the precon decks also. Maybe, you could go back to the Jyhad type decks, no fix cards just randomly X cards. It's like a large booster. The expansion would be the best, if you can manage it to be like: 50 or so new cards and 100 or so reprints from the older sets, maybe based on a poll (separately for each card type, the top 20 gets into the fold). Bloodlines and LoB cards almost as sought after as the KoT cards.

Poci wrote:

Maybe, you could go back to the Jyhad type decks, no fix cards just randomly X cards.

Precon have the advantage of being directly playable for total newbies. If you remove the retailer constraint (they don't want to shelf 40 or so different starters), is it possible to have one starter per clan available? Lasombra and Gangrel in particular badly need a reprint of their core discipline.