Prologue: An Isekai Story

Hello everyone! Citsacras here. The past 15 months have been absolute insanity–from the peak frenzy of the TCG boom, watching the funding numbers race up to dizzying heights on Day 1 of the Kickstarter campaign, to the endlessly frustrating quality issues and abysmal fulfillment process. Watching along as first a backer, then player, moderator, and finally, developer, I have a fascinatingly unique perspective on the Grand Archive and Weebs of the Shore storyline, and I wanted to take some time to consolidate my personal thoughts into this retrospective look at the Kickstarter campaign and production.

One boring Monday evening, after a grueling day of work, I was absent-mindedly scrolling through my Facebook feed when an innocuous banner ad popped up. “Grand Archive TCG” with a picture of Lorraine. I chuckled a bit because I knew I hit all of the boxes for the algorithm: an 18-34-year-old male in California, who likes anime and is interested in card games. I clicked the ad and browsed the Kickstarter campaign page, showed some friends, and eventually, joined Discord to check it out. At this point, I was strictly a collector, having only played four games of Hearthstone beta and the classic playground Yu-Gi-Oh! where the rules didn’t matter. I, like many others at the time, was caught up in the TCG mania, rediscovering my old Pokemon collections, and hungry for opportunities.

I talked with some collector friends about Grand Archive, about what we found amazing (the art direction, the game design, the sample quality), and what could be red flags. What actually convinced me to dig a bit deeper was the small community that had formed pre-Kickstarter (GK locals!) and how ruthlessly open the creators were about discussing and debating their vision. Eventually, I figured that if I was planning on committing any amount of significant money to this campaign, a flight and hotel were pretty minimal costs to pay to meet and vet the team in person. To my surprise, almost no one else had the same thought, and this became the spark for an adventure.

I came away from that weekend convinced that the team had an amazing vision for Grand Archive and solid product sense. The art direction was crystal clear, and the game was both easy and replayable for me, a complete TCG newbie. I knew the team had captured lightning in a jar. What I didn’t know was whether that lightning would ignite a fire or fizzle out, so I doubled down on my original backing, convinced quite a few friends that this project had potential, and began cultivating the discord community as the moderator in charge, organizing learn-to-plays and tournaments with those fun original doodle print-and-plays.

What’s more, my industry background was in business strategy, operations, and management consulting for F100 companies, and so I offered to help consult and advise the team on any business plans they might look to explore in the future. I was still working 60-80 hours per week at my day job, but the rest of my free time was spent building the nascent Grand Archive community and supporting the Weebs of the Shore team.

The rest is history. The campaign raised a record-breaking $947,400 for the time, market reception was very positive, and work on Dawn of Ashes began in earnest. After a few months, in the middle of a TFT game, I joked that I should formally join the team to help out. As it turns out, the team had already fielded the idea, and what started as a joke quickly became a serious discussion. Pretty soon, at the end of May, I quit my day job, inverted my world, and formally joined Weebs of the Shore as a dev.

Act I: Power Leveling

With a startup, there are no roles, only jobs that need to be done. With Anime Expo on the horizon, there was very little fanfare to my joining. We needed to be polished and ready for our first true showcase to the public. We spent countless sleepless nights polishing the website, putting together the rulebook, drafting articles, and developing the lore and story.

To make matters worse, small issues kept cropping up. Our repeated tests with our manufacturer weren’t yielding the improvements we wanted. Our playmat shipment got lost and reforwarded to the east coast! We were beyond nervous and stressed. Who’s going to want to stop by if we have no merchandise? What if no one showed up at our booth? What if no one wanted to demo our game? Do you know how much carpet costs for Anime Expo?? The weeks leading up to Anime Expo were exhausting; I even caught Covid and missed half of the convention.

Despite our fears, the reception was beyond incredible. Our booth was slammed–hour-long waiting times just to demo the game. By the end of Anime Expo, half of us had lost our voices, and the other half could barely stand straight. I can still remember the floating feeling of disembodiment as we lay down on that blue carpet for the last few hours of cleanup, staring up in shock at what just transpired. Thousands of people had stopped by our booth, tried out Grand Archive for the first time, and tried their luck at our garapon. We met some of our biggest backers and beloved community members for the first time, and in the end, it validated that magic I had felt so long ago at PAX Unplugged. We really did have something special here.

However, as our backers can tell you, there was still a mountain of work ahead. We were still running into infuriating print issues. Our manufacturer samples always had some issue, whether it was cutting, foiling, or overall quality. I came to find out later that the manufacturer we were working with was actually a middle-man project manager that subcontracted out printing and packing–something very common in the overseas printing industry. The frustrations actually boiled over to the point where we had to demand compensation, they abandoned a shipment at the port, and our working relationship imploded.

Yea…needing to source a new manufacturer that late into the project timeline was unideal. Thankfully, we had been referred to a different printer in Taiwan in parallel, and the early sample iterations were looking promising. We ultimately didn’t communicate the reason publicly to assuage fears but did make the painful decision to announce an expected release delay into the new year to account for the ramp-up of a new supplier and to build in time to deliver a quality product.

We spent long nights discussing and debating how boxes and packs should be structured, and even more days researching how collation and randomization work for other card games, and how we might replicate that formula. What we soon came to realize is that there’s a reason the majority of TCGs are published by billion-dollar corporations like Wizards and Bandai and printed through dedicated TCG printers like Cartimundi or Millenium. As an indie TCG, you’re only realistically left with two options, try to print locally in North America for high prices but lower shipping times, or outsource your project to China for cheap. We chose option three instead.

The printer that had been referred to us was actually a high-quality poker card and luxury packaging manufacturer; they were looking to break into the TCG space but hadn’t secured any projects yet. Recognizing the precision print capabilities they had in-house, we decided to partner together to build up their internal TCG capabilities from the ground up to ultimately be able to manufacture Grand Archive to our specifications and standards.

Adamant to not repeat the same failed process with our old manufacturer, I booked travel to Taiwan for four months out of my own pocket to oversee the manufacturing process in person–two months for First Edition, and then another two months for Alter Edition. It helped that I both spoke Mandarin and had a valid passport for international travel, but I was not prepared for how brutal of an undertaking this was going to be.

Every day, I would field sales calls with Oceania in the morning, make the one-hour commute to the factory or packing facility, spend 9-10 hours overseeing, helping, or reviewing processes, before commuting back, and then taking meetings with the US or Europe as they woke up. When crunch time came, I joined the assembly line myself, packing together boxes, sealing cases, and QAing packs. I ended up hand-reviewing every single CUR, stacking and seeding them so that there wouldn’t be any repeated copies or clumps of serial numbers.

Finding a printer who was willing to invest, iterate, and test in real-time with us on the ground is one of the luckiest and most crucial pieces of our success, in my opinion. This example might sound absurd and frivolous, but we spent three print batches over a full workweek tweaking, arguing, and pleading over the ink levels in our black border. Did you know there are multiple variants of black and some appear blacker than others, depending on the ink, paper, and printer? And yet, if your black is too black, then you’ll run into print and cut issues. Trust me, I felt about as absurd as that sentence at the moment trying to explain it to our project manager. This isn’t the black I want!

Ultimately, that level of scrutiny and precision worked in our favor. Without the delay, I don’t think we would’ve been able to deliver a product we could be proud of. Of course, there are a million aspects we want to improve, have already improved on, or are planning on testing and iterating on. Those packs? Yeah, I hate them too. I can give you the whole reason for polymer chain alignment, plastic manufacturing, and heat sealing, but, ultimately, we didn’t have the capability and time to utilize an easier-to-open material. We’ve already adjusted them for future releases.

I’m simultaneously extremely proud of the quality of the product we were able to deliver with Dawn of Ashes First Edition, but I also can’t open any boxes because, to me, all I can see are flaws that can be improved.

Act II: Flashback Sequence

TCGs are run on passion–from the local level, to store owners, distributors, and publishers. And yet, passion is not nearly enough to succeed. There are so many critical factors that go into getting a project into print, and the graveyard of TCGs on Wikipedia is a bleak reminder that failure is the norm. There is no playbook for how to make a good TCG, no manual for what skills to practice, or a list of talent to source from. Game design, art direction, character design, graphic design, UX design, UI design, frontend, backend, storytelling, writing, worldbuilding, process management, printing, die-cutting, collation, quality assurance, package shipment, freight, logistics, customs clearance, sales, marketing, operations, legal, accounting, finance management, customer service, relationship building, community, event planning, tournament organization, organized play. The list is endless.

My friends like to poke fun at me sometimes; I complained so much about working too hard at my old job only to take a 95% pay cut to work double the amount of hours. But standing in Good Games Greensborough in Melbourne, watching 30 people playing Grand Archive for locals, was when everything clicked into place for me. Getting to watch people actively play and enjoy Grand Archive validated all of my efforts spent on bringing this game to life over the past year and a half. All those nights I spent sleepless, anxious about whether people would take us seriously or even pick up the game were forgotten at Tauranga, New Zealand, where over 300 people came to demo Grand Archive and passionate store owners grilled me about the future lore and worldbuilding.

This community and the excitement you all have for Grand Archive make all of the blood, sweat, and tears worth it. Without the passionate players, store owners, and partners in this industry that believed in us, that took the massive risk in backing our Kickstarter, carrying Alter Edition, or building local communities, we would not be where we are today. I speak for the full team at Weebs of the Shore when I say that your time and enjoyment are the most important investment you can give us, and we hope to be able to provide you with even more exciting products and experiences to come.

Act III: Ascension

What comes next? We already have Fractured Crown on the horizon. In fact, I need to go back to Taiwan in a couple of weeks to oversee manufacturing for that set. I’ll say this upfront–we won’t be perfect. I know that there’ll be many speed bumps and mistakes as we continue to learn how to grow and scale both the game and company. But we have so many exciting projects, ideas, stories, and worlds we want to explore with you, and hope you’ll continue to spend your time and attention with us. The story for Grand Archive and Weebs of the Shore is still unfolding!

Hope to see many of you at Ascent or perhaps a more local event!