The first few years of a TCG are the hardest. In its very brief history, Force of Will has already undergone some ups and downs. The early honeymoon in the US of the Grimm Cluster, with the dual stones, transformed into the disappointment with Millennia of Ages, and although I missed it, it looks like the Alice Cluster had a JTMS (Jace, the Mind Sculptor) problem, with an over-powered (OP) ruler (Reflect, Child of Potential; Refrain, Child of Convergence) owning the meta.
When we compare the early years of Magic the Gathering, Force of Will could have a lot more time to recover from the current difficulties than some people give it. If we estimate how much time there is for Force of Will to reach the point Magic the Gathering reached with Ice Age, and using the number of cards as our gauge; it looks like Force of Will has the remaining of Lapis block and the entire next cluster to reach approximately 1,600 cards. If by that time the game does not have a long list of playable cards, and has not come up with a financial model that will make distributors and stores want to buy into the game, then Force of Will will suffer the fate of other failed TCGs. The game can remain a Green game for a while though. After all, the color of early Magic is Blue, and the game is still going strong.
I hope Force of Will lives on for a long time. The current situation can be best described this way:
- The secondary market is almost non-existent.
- Two of the main sets are being dumped on the market (Moonlit Savior and Battle for Attoricta) and another bombed in a Fallen Empires way (Millennia of Ages).
- The first two Vingold beginner products completely missed the mark (I guess we could call them the Homelands set).
- The latest products have sold out, which seems like a good thing but can mean that as distributors bail out, the avenues for supplying the product shrink.
Many have pointed out how the current situation can be improved, and I am mixing in my own suggestions:
- Make sets that allow for a secondary market. That way stores can crack packs for a profit instead of being forced to dump booster boxes at a loss.
- Make a beginner's deck-building product that is good and affordable. The main three TCGs know how to do this well (Pokemon, Yugioh, and Magic the Gathering). Vingolf 3 looks like that product, except it has sold out and is selling for $75 on ebay. It should be a product that sells for, at the most, $40. See Magic the Gathering's Deckbuilder's Toolkit for a very successful example.
- Make bigger sets (150 to 200 cards) for a 36 pack box of 10 cards/pack, or 24 pack booster boxes (the larger sets would be a much better option for these two choices). Right now the booster boxes are 50 percent larger than a Yugioh booster box and set size is very nearly the same for the two games.
- Have $15 theme/starter decks. OK, I get that the Lapis Starter Decks are more like juiced up Yugioh Structure Decks. You still need baby step starter decks like the ones the three major TCGs make, and you need at least two for every new set.
- Have a real communication strategy in English. Spend a few dollars on a professional English site written by people who understand the language. The current community articles are a great start. The goal should be to write at least one of these every weekday, and that way players can get a daily fix of a well-written article discussing at least a dozen cards.
Force of Will has many positive qualities:
- Some of the best artwork ever.
- Novel gameplay that solves the mana-screw problem of Magic the Gathering.
- Gameplay that combines Magic the Gathering (mostly) and Yugioh (to a lesser extent), which makes the game easy to learn by players from those two TCG communities.
Here is a toast for the prospect of Force of Will being a successful TCG for decades to come!
