Novelty's Custom Cards 101

I'm sure I must have written about this somewhere, but I can't for the life of me find where I actually filed it. So this is just a cheap reproduction of how I make custom cards.

January: Review the expansion from 2 years ago (let's just call that TW) to get it final. Review the comments from the expansion last year (let's call this EF) to get it ready for playtesting. Continue collecting images for the expansion this year (let's call it AoD) to get it ready for design.

February - April: Start getting TW cards ready for being "custom legal" - get the final push for people to playtest, correct text, rules, etc. Add EF cards to gEngine for playtest. Also any promos going with EF is to be added to the engine at this time. Template images onto MND cards for AoD. Templated cards will contain the name of the card as well as its energy in the top left hand corner of the card.

May: TW gets finalised and become "custom legal". EF continues being playtested. Final push for templating AoD cards.

June - August: Start getting TW promos ready for being "custom legal" - get the final push for people to playtest, correct text, rules, etc. EF continues being playtested. Get the designers to start giving text for the AoD cards. The basic process goes something like this - the get the cards, with the images, names and starting costs. Then they write lots of text which usually gets thrown out by me at the first pass and I usually tell them to redo to either fit the theme of the expansion, the theme of the region, the things that needs support for that region or just because I feel that the card isn't going to represent its full potential. People like Ultradoug get really upset and frustrated at this stage and they start calling me "Simon Powell evil twin" or something like that. Start thinking about next year's expansion (let's call that FH).

August - November: TW promo expansion becomes "custom legal". EF continues being playtested. Post the AoD cards out for comments rolling them out region by region slowly. Start collecting images for FH.

December: Start getting EF cards ready for being "custom legal" - get the final push for people to playtest, correct text, rules, etc. Finish getting comments for AoD to get them ready for playtesting. Continue collecting images for FH - start to think about the promo theme for FH.

And the next year repeat again (with EF replacing TW, AoD replacing EF and FH replacing AoD and new expansion ZZ replacing FH). Custom cards takes almost 3 years to design from start to finish as custom legal cards. Most people will see it about halfway through the cycle and expect it to be custom legal in a short while but it does take a lot longer than that to make a proper card in my books.

Wizards of the Coast uses a rather similar schedule as well for the game which I shouldn't mention in case they send me a nasty letter, except that they do it for blocks instead of expansions and they take time out to tweak the 2nd and 3rd expansion in the block about a month before release based on the feedback of the release of the previous expansion(s) in the block.

As this shows, at any point in time, I'm two expansions ahead and even if I stop everything right now, I still have 2 expansions in development and the next one being thought out. To bring those 2 expansions to fruitation would still take at least 2 years to complete. Oh and have I mentioned that I don't get paid to do this?