That all makes sense but at this point in the game don't we pretty much know what will sell and what will languish through it's campaign? I would say that this deck is of comparable quality to Paul's Deco. I doubt it labors to it's funding goal especially with Randy as the designer and the brand power of HOPC pushing it. I agree it seems like a win win for them. My only mental speed bump is that I feel like Kickstarter is meant to do just that for new business owners/designers/inventors. It's a little strange from my perspective that I am providing startup capital to an established entity. Rest assured as a collector I'll still back this. However, I respect the way Paul did it with deco. He invested his own profit back in or at least was willing to if necessary. Hence the low goal
I wasn't speaking specifically to the Imperial Deck, but to a theoretical "Brand X" deck - while Randy's got a huge following and we enjoy his work, some of the decks people design are more of an unknown factor. I'm tracking a deck now on the New Deck Report that debuted Saturday from a previously unknown designer with an $18,500 goal. It's a deck that easily all but a handful of members here would have zero interest in. It's also at over $20,000 and climbing... Conversely, a deck could have very high hopes and be well-liked by card people, like the project for SiShou - Four Beasts, but go on to languish, raising only a small portion of the funds needed despite all the positive buzz and support. There's a lot of variables to selling a new, limited-edition custom deck, especially when it's from a first-time designer, and there's no way to account for them all.
I was of the opinion, once (even recently), that a company shouldn't keep coming back to the well, so to speak, starting new KS projects after new KS project but never quite becoming economically strong enough to stand on its own, or perhaps the company is being run by a person or people who are too risk-averse. But when it comes to playing cards, there's been such an explosion here in just a handful of months - I'd even say much less than a year - that unless you're one of the majors (D&D, T11, E, DB) which are also involved in magic instruction and/or run by well-known magicians/cardists, or USPC themselves, all the action in custom decks is right there on KS. (And "majors" is a loosely-defined term, since the bulk of these companies have an employee roster that's below twenty people, sometimes WAY below.) Designers keep coming back here because people keep coming back here, all wanting more and better. Despite the best intentions of the creators of Kickstarter, it has really evolved away from a means to start a new business and toward being a marketplace of businesses where the barriers to entry are dramatically lowered through crowd-funding - in essence, "crowd-funding" has become another way to say "pre-ordering", at least for the creators whose projects are actually worth making.
For every Lee McKenzie or Mark Stutzman who's made decks for one of the aforementioned majors, there's got to be a good handful we've never even heard of. The same can't be said of Kickstarter - we know names like Lance Miller, Paul Carpenter, Randy Butterfield and others because they came here and hung out their virtual shingles, presenting their wares for backers to help create. HOPC is actually responding to issues I've seen other deck designers work to respond to - some talk of the arduous task of fulfillment when they're working or attending school full-time or having a personal disaster pull them completely away from their project, others talk of what the hell to do with all those leftover decks after the fulfillment is done. HOPC takes care of both tasks - it's obviously for a cut of the action, but it's also taking all that STUFF designers had to deal with and making it vanish in a puff of Pure Smoke...
