Altered becomes biggest-ever TCG Kickstarter after raising $7m for groundbreaking approach to collecting cards
Revolutionary CCG from Dixit creator’s new studio will let players print as many cards as they like.
After breezing past $1 million on Kickstarter on its first day, innovative TCG Altered has become the highest-funded trading card game to date on the crowdfunding site.
Altered is the flagship game from new studio Equinox, which packs plenty of industry experience and CCG expertise behind its debut release. The newfounded team combines the former head of Dixit and Mysterium studio Libellud, Régis Bonnessée, with top-level Magic: The Gathering players - including a former World Champion - and ex-Hearthstone developers from Blizzard.
Helping Altered TCG’s original universe and conflict-averse racing gameplay stand up against the big-brand likes of MTG, Pokemon, Disney Lorcana and this year’s upcoming Star Wars: Unlimited is its groundbreaking approach to adding cards to your library. Each physical card - pulled from a randomised booster pack, like typical CCGs - has a QR code that, when scanned using the game’s companion app, assigns ownership to the player.
The key thing here is that once a player has pulled at least one copy of a card, they can freely order as many additional copies as they want, printed on demand and shipped by Equinox for a dollar per card plus shipping. The ambition is to minimise the cost of searching through endless booster packs for enough duplicates to round out your deck, or having to pay inflated prices on the secondary market.
There will still be a secondary market, however, with players able to digitally trade their ownership of a card to others through the app itself, exchanging their ability to print it until they register another copy. The physical cards don’t rely on the app to play, so you can print what you need and then sell them on, but you’ll need to prove current ownership for official tournaments.
In addition to individual cards, each $3.99 booster pack may include a “foiler” that unlocks the ability to print a holographic variant of a card already in the player’s collection. Foilers can similarly be traded before they’re applied to a particular card. (Edit: Booster price corrected.)
The combination of a revolutionary approach to collecting, compelling gameplay - as we experienced for ourselves last year - and vivid, imaginative visuals recalling the likes of League of Legends’ diverse roster of heroes clearly won over players, as Altered TCG’s recent Kickstarter campaign closed on February 29th with over €6.2 million ($6.7m) raised from close to 15,000 backers.
The impressive total makes Altered the most successful Kickstarter campaign for a trading card game in the crowdfunding giant’s history, as well as placing it among the top two dozen biggest Kickstarters of any kind, ahead of fellow tabletop projects like the Dark Souls board game, Marvel United and Nemesis.
Following the crowdfunder, Altered TCG will see a wide release on August 26th.