Thanks Don, it seems I've severely underestimated the KS or custom cards market. Do you think we'll eventually enter peak card and have the card bubble burst? It's feeling eerily similar to the comic book bubble of the 90's. Everybody is making limited edition runs and non-vintage decks are fetching hundreds of dollars on ebay. I'm not sure if the demand can sustain itself.
It's a topic that's been discussed before, both on the forum and in the pages of CARD CULTURE. I think it's the aftermarket that runs the risk of collapse more than the retail segment. There's a few hyper-inflated decks out there right now.
There are market forces at work on Kickstarter that weren't in play when comics were the big deal they were in the '90s. Think about it - could anyone with adequate talent make a comic book and have it professionally printed? Would an inadequately-popular comic never get made because there wasn't enough market interest in it before the first issue was printed, or did comic companies throw stuff out there just to see what would stick, even if it cost them money in the long run? Was supply calculated to meet demand by using backers and their pledges to determine the size of a print run, or did comic companies simply print all the comics they wanted to sell and cross their fingers that they'd all sell, risking their own cash in the process?
There might be a bubble, but there's also a very different market dynamic at play. The bulk of the market's activity right now is in crowdfunding, and crowdfunding has a very different set of rules from retail.