Redemption Printing Update

Quite a number of you have put your faith in me to deliver physical Destiny cards to you, and I thought you might like a quick update on where we are in getting those to you.

One of my big gripes as a player with FFG’s stewardship of this game is how opaque they were with the manufacturing process. You have trade secrets, I get it, but some level of communication about the process would have gone a long way to helping your player base understand the delays. With that in mind, I’ve resolved to be much more open with you guys about it. There’s still some secret sauce (and a lot of elbow grease), but I want you all to have the best information you can to accurately set your expectations.

One of the rumors we always discussed with the FFG delays was the mythical Chinese New Year. Plenty of folks, myself included, worked hard to excuse FFGs release delays by invoking this mythical Spring Festival. Now that I’m on this side of things I can tell you definitively that it’s real and it absolutely does impact production. For two weeks in February the entire country shuts down, and any order you have with Chinese producers is on pause. You just have to deal with it. The CNY is something you can work around, to an extent. It’s not like it’s a surprise. Like Easter or Thanksgiving, the dates are known well ahead of time. Redemption’s release at the end of February has introduced some interesting challenges with this.

The three components of a Destiny set are the dice, the stickers, and the cards. Here’s where we are on all of those:

• Dice: I bought.. a lot in December. Surely this would hold me over well into 2021. I still have quite a few, enough to satisfy my current orders, but I’m going to need more Blue dice for any future set orders. Those are already on order, and I hope to have them in the mail on their way here before the country shuts down on 2/12. Thanks to you guys, I now have sufficient buying power to have dice custom poured and colored, so hopefully, these will be perfect Destiny dice recreations.
• Cards: One of the logistical challenges of the ARH era is that the physical creation of the cards is decoupled from the design and release of the cards. To make sure none of the various producers have an advantage, everyone in the world outside of the core ARH team (not including the set designers) sees these at the same time. While that’s great and necessary for parity, the lead time in having things made makes it rough to time correctly. My printed cards have all been ordered, and I’ve been told that they will definitely hit the mail before the Spring Festival kicks off. This does include all of the foil sets.
• Stickers: The stickers are the ones I have the most control over as I physically produce them all myself. Shortly after the set releases, my dwarven forges begin to come alive. Choking and belching furnace smoke into the air of Kingwood, TX, I’ve gotten numerous noise complaints from all the banging and hammering. Currently, sticker production is in full swing, and gloriously beautiful sticker sets are rolling off the production lines.

As for an ETA, my current expectation is to start dropping sets in the mail on or around Valentine’s Day. Because what says romance to your wife better than, “Hey honey, let’s load up the truck and take a trip to the Post Office!”