When we first set out to design Manifold, we had one premise that we desperately wanted to meet. Star Wars Destiny had just been announced as deceased, Magic: the Gathering was moving into its Secret Lair model, and Flesh and Blood was revealing itself as a highly collectible but moderately playable game (with some scandalous distribution channels). We conjectured that the secret to a successful game is to maximize profits for the small hobby store.
Our end goal with this project is to create a game that lasts, one that we can ourselves play and design for as long as possible. While that is tangentially related to making money off this game, none of the decisions that we are making are done with the express intent of maximizing profit. With that in mind, and after over a decade of interacting with different forms of primary and secondary markets for a variety of trading card games both as gamers and as hobby store owners, we believe that the following theory is fundamentally linked to the health of the game.
There are not any Legend of the Five Rings stores. The development team for Manifold includes people who helped develop Ivion, another card game with the board game distribution model. A local hobby store tried very hard to help that game take off, and there is one simple reason that it could not.
The Living Card Game model seems ideal for the player. You only need to buy one copy of the box. You only need to buy each expansion once as it comes out. You can keep up with every card in the game for sometimes as little as $40 a quarter. This seems ideal for the player until you realize that you have nowhere to play, and nobody to play with. That $160 a year from each player does not keep a hobby store open. This is why you see stores dedicated to Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, or Warhammer, but never Star Realms or Monopoly.
To put it simply, a healthy secondary market enables a healthy place to play. Or as we like to put it: if you can make the hobby store money, you get a free salesman in every town.
So what sorts of decisions do we make in order to make money for hobby stores? The short and sweet answer is that we need to make the game collectible. Manifold is, at its core, an engine building game skinned as an epic character combat game. In at least one early development meeting it was described as ‘Star Wars Destiny meets Century: Spice Road’. We make an effort to put the most complicated cards at Rare, which will show up at a rate of 2 per pack. Well, it turns out the most complicated cards are the cards with the most words on them. This either means they do the most, or they need the greatest number of restrictions because of their implicit power level. If a tournament scene ever develops, players are going to need some rares to make the best decks. To get them, they either need to crack packs, or they need to buy these rares on the secondary market.
The second thing we did to facilitate the secondary market is to get rid of the unique dice mechanic present in Star Wars Destiny. By having each card roll a combination of the same seven dice, we’ve made it so that acquiring a single card only ever requires the shipping of a single card. This part is going to be a little USA-centric, but I imagine it will work similarly in other markets. A single card can be shipped with a single stamp, ~$.52. A card with a unique dice (like, let’s say, a Star Wars Destiny Rare) requires $3.50 in postage. This means every transaction that isn’t done locally has a $3.50 tax in value that is lost to the market, which means either the cards cost more than the end user is willing to pay, or the seller makes a smaller margin than is worth their time.
Then, the only issue that’s on us to solve is the question of how players get dice. We think we have a solution to this issue, and we hope that it pans out like we think it will.
As a player, you might not be thrilled to buy into this game after hearing all the work we’re putting into letting your local hobby store wring dollars out of you, but let me put your mind at ease: if the game is good (and we think it is), the player base will grow. If we print enough Tyryn Sentinels to satisfy demand, and the player base grows, the cards in Tyryn Sentinels will eventually be seen as scarce. If there are 10,000 players in the world in 2024, and 20,000 players in 2025, then there is twice as much demand as was supplied for.
I don’t mean to mince words. We will reprint cards as necessary for the health of the game, and we want to preserve the value of singles to enable a secondary market. This means that we seek to preserve the value of your collection just as much as we seek to preserve the value of a store’s collection.
I hope this essay can be pointed to in the future as the first sign of our commitment to creating healthy play communities in your area, because that’s what it’s all about. Well, that and space-lizard-people fighting giant robots with energy swords and blaster pistols.
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