Hi, I am the one that was on kickstarter with the BAD… first card project. I am looking to know anything and everything that is needed to be known when printing and shipping cards. I did not know that cards could be so expensive. I was currently help by a former Kickstarter by the name of John. He insisted on me to come to aethercards.com to seek help and end my project because I was illy prepared.
No wonder I never got to see the project's home page...
Before you attempt another Kickstarter project, bear in mind that it's a serious business venture. Failure to follow through on your rewards can actually result in civil and criminal charges being brought against you. It's not something you do lightheartedly with little concern for consequences.
Your deck could be summed up very easily: USPC-standard faces in black, white and green, custom one-way back design, and very little else. What specifically brought you to designing a deck in the first place? Because from the looks of it, at least on the surface, it appears that you simply wanted to put something together that would make lots of money for you (somehow), with very little attention paid to the actual design work. The most successful decks here aren't so bland and cookie-cutter. They're examples of projects where the design and art were at the top of the list of motivations for the project's creator(s). They did what they loved and they did it well - the money just followed from there.
Before considering any deck design, think of what it is you want to accomplish with your project. You'll probably receive no more attention to your deck than what you put into it in the first place, and possibly even less. Many far-better designs have crashed and burned - without some heart and soul invested in it, you stand little chance, and even then there's no guarantees.
Let's look at originality - it's never mandatory that a design be completely original, but again, all those top-grossing decks were made from designs that were considered unique at the time they were made. There's been a good number of Cthulhu/Lovecraft-based decks in recent months, but the progenitor of them all was Bicycle the Call of Cthulhu, now ranked #3 highest-grossing deck - all the others came later and had varying degrees of success. Being the first of a kind, a trendsetter who triggers a popular theme/craze, will make it more likely (again, never guaranteed) that your deck will become very successful, even if you aren't aiming for the top three or even the top five. The only time mediocre designs "succeed" is when the designer aims very low, using a cheap printer that allows for small print runs and lowering the bar for what's needed to succeed. Even then, they often hit their goals with the slimmest of margins for error - or not at all.
Your design would have been practically innovative - perhaps fifteen years ago. Today, it's more like "So what, I've seen this before and done better - what else ya got?" Spend some time researching what came before and that might give you an idea of what hasn't come yet and interests you. And no, a deck need not be 100% original in concept, but it needs to have something about it that makes it stand out from the crowd, or it will end up trampled and ignored. It has to have something that will draw people to it like moths to a neon sign on a hot summer night. If you don't do at least that, your expectations of success would be about as realistic as a freshman high school student and art neophyte becoming the next DaVinci before his senior year.
I could ramble on and on, but I think you have enough to chew on for now. I haven't even touched upon the research required for pricing your deck and calculating your shipping costs for whatever tiers you create and add-ons you offer...
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