This might be news to many but we've been grinding at a lot of different things behind the scenes and looking at what exists out there to decide on how we could improve things for our releases. A physical card collection of @holozing has been something I've personally been fascinated by and definitely have put a lot of thought into it while waiting on things to get finished on the "game" side of our project. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about our plans for a physical collection set, some work we've done there and how far we've come in planning it out!
While NFT's are great, there's something special about having something you can hold in your hands and look at every now and then. Ignoring that the physical assets can some times come in different variations of quality depending on how the printing machines did that day, how the workers handled the process, etc, there's a big market in grading physical cards which does not need to exist in the NFT space. We'd want to fill that craving of collectors by also bridging over to the web2 world with a physical collection and give those collectors a chance to participate in our ecosystem and game through it.
There are certain restrictions we have to place through rarities in our physical collection set and the way we've planned on inviting those collectors over to play the game. The restrictions mainly depend on the cost of @holozing alpha vials, we don't want to undermine those who've bought vials for $20 each to make it cheaper for physical collectors to get the same advantages as them. This means physical collectors opening our packs will find themselves pulling rare cards that give them a digital copy less often than those who bought Vials directly.
Now before we get into some examples, let's look into the idea of how a physical collection compares to nfts.
The physical cards will already have a separate value of their own. These can also be traded among collectors at their own discretion. Our plans are to include a unique QR coded card into every pack, this will not only verify its content with our database that the cards within have not been re-sealed and picked from while at the same time openly and transparently providing supply stats to collectors which many current "web2" physical collections don't do. I.e. if you buy Magic the Gathering cards and let's say you pull a very rare one, you won't be able to know how many rare ones of this have been printed, how many more will be printed in the future or how many may have been pulled. Our system will give physical collectors a lot more transparency while at the same time giving them some additional value in the form of our in-game currency.
By scanning the QR code belonging to each pack on our website, you will receive points that'll grant you weight towards our collection rewards of Zing distribution. At the same time this will verify the cards you were meant to receive in that pack. If you get lucky enough to pull some of the rarer cards you will also receive a digital version of that creature/healer to play in the game. There will be certain restrictions here to avoid complications, one of them being "what happens to the weight and digital versions if you were to trade the QR code card and rare cards that have a digital copy to another person". For this we will implement a "confirmation" system where the original scanner of the QR code card and owner of rare cards that have a digital copy will have to verify that a new owner laying claim to those specific serial'd cards. This is to prevent zing earnings moving away from the original owner in the events of thefts or accidental scanning on another holozing account.
The randomness spread for rare cards has to match the base price of alpha vials and healer mints, this means that to receive digital copies of your rare physical cards you'd need on average to buy at least $20 worth of packs to receive a digital version of a starter creature and as you may have guessed it, these digital copies won't be tradable as they won't be NFTs. They will however, allow you to play the game and earn zing and other in-game materials and capture creatures that can be turned into nfts after you upgrade to a web3 account, i.e. Hive.
There's quite a lot more to talk about this so in an effort to not make this post too long I'll try keep it a bit shorter here towards the end so it's more of a pre-announcement kind of thing of some of our plans.
We've had successful talks with a Kickstarter campaign manager who are usually quite selective with who they work with so their success rate stays high, they loved the idea of our game and physical card collection but informed us to keep words like "nfts" and "crypto" as far away from the project as possible. This is quite understandable due to the reputation it has amassed over the years so we're quite happy with our solutions allowing people to only opt-in to web3 accounts if or when they choose to do so rather than forcing them to.
Our plan is to get started with this in Q2, the Kickstarter campaign will see to it that we can order a big batch of cards to be printed and raise funds through fiat to take care of the printing along with taxes and shipping. We will definitely post about it here as well when the time comes. Naturally we'll want the game to be close to beta before the Kickstarter campaign ends so people can hop directly into the game when they receive their packs and pull something rare they can play with.
Keep in mind this is a collection set only, i.e. there won't be a physical board game similar to other TCG's you may be used to. That may however come in future sets. Since this is a collection set, however, that means we'll be looking for artists to draw pieces of cards for us in their own style for the physical set. Thus we're very excited about that since we have so many amazing artists who've been creating fanart for our project for a very long time on Hive and we hope to fill our needs through them completely before looking outside.
Lastly, just to give you an idea of what the card borders would look like, here's one that'll be for creatures next to one with combo artwork such as healer + creature or other rare artworks for the collection set. To give this a nice preview I borrowed some fanart from @tiffany here and @solumviz here. I didn't spend too much time on this so you can imagine the first one will also have buttons in different rarity colors along with text representing the stat amount, whereas the next one will be more of a artwork card without stats. At least I jumped to use photoshop this time around compared to my usual ms paint stuff!
Anyway, more info and discussions about our physical set to come, hope you liked the previews and some of the discussions surrounding them. Especially some of the new things we haven't seen elsewhere, such as physical collections and merch providing players with access to the game and to earn some in-game tokens along with rarer pieces giving way for digital copies that'll let them play the game, earn more zing, craft items, capture creatures and whenever they feel ready they'll be able to upgrade to an immutable web3 account along with a lot more transparency on card issuance and supply we don't really see anywhere else in the space!