Week 5: Life Counters

I have been thinking a bit lately about the best way to keep track of life during the game. My playgroup mostly uses 20-sided die, however, when I visit local gaming stores I often see people using paper & pencil or a phone app. While my playgroup enjoys dice because of the visibility and tradition, I think paper & pencil or phone apps work well because they show current life total and the history of past life loss or life gain. I think this is the reason why these methods are so popular, especially at a competitive level. Personally, I think these methods are very good for competitive play and so I think the casual group is where we should look for innovation. I have seen a lot of custom counters and spin downs and life wheels, so there are obviously people who want to personalize their method of tracking life. It would be fun to see more innovation coming from companies. I think the recent release of Commander's Arsenal had an awesome dice and I would love to see more of that from Wizards and other companies. Especially when it is a "collector's item," because I saw that dice being sold for $20 on ebay, so clearly there is a demand (even if it is due to rarity). Hopefully we will see more of this type of innovation in the future. Happy Holidays!

Week 3: Trade Binders

What is your favorite way to store your trades?

For most people it is probably one of three things:
- Trade book with plastic placeholders
- 3-hole punch pages with plastic placeholders (to insert inside of a binder)
- Box or rubber-band

My question for the readers of this blog: do you can see any type of innovation for holding trades?

If you had to come up with a solution that would solve the 5 major issues below what would it be?
- Volume (being able to carry a large amount of cards)
- Portability (easy for travel and not too large)
- Protection (protecting the cards)
- Visibility (making the cards easily visible & accessible)
- Price (cost to own and use)

Currently I think the current options solve these issues well, but for the purpose of the blog let's see if we can think of an improvement for each issue. I will update as people post their ideas! I encourage you to participate! Don't be afraid to push the boundaries, but make sure what you suggest is also feasible (only the cards are Magic).

Volume:

Portability:

Protection:

Visibility:

Price:

Other: This is for any other improvements or innovations that you all can think of.

I will start us off with an idea. This would go under the Other category. I think it would be cool if there was a phone application that you could enter your collection into. It could have a simple search engine and provide real-time prices via TCGplayer or something similar. This way players who want to look for specific cards could look through another player's trades more quickly. Something like this may already exist, but I didn't see anything too advanced with my quick Google search.

See you again next week!

Week 2: Deck Carrying Cases

Update: Before I begin I would like to update everyone on the change. I have changed the name from ThinkTank to TCG ThoughtLab. Before ThinkTank was about all entrepreneurial ideas and opportunities, but it was too broad of a subject to try to optimize (for my internship). So I have changed the subject purely to trading card games in order to keep in step with the first post. Hope you all enjoy it!

If you are a part of the University of Minnesota magic club then you may have already seen the custom cases myself and a few others bring to carry our decks. They are aluminum cases with ten 60 card deck slots and have enough wiggle room that my younger brother can even fit an entire Ultra Pro deck box inside a single slot (somewhat of a tight fit though). I had these made as some nice souvenirs while I was in China, but I have had numerous people ask me about them and where to get them, so I figured there must be some demand. Since I only had 6 made and had to ship them they were upwards of $70, but most of that cost was shipping. I was wondering how much other people would be willing to pay for something like this (let me know in the comments, but read the rest first).

From my personal experience with my case I would say the outside is easily dented, so while it would be cool to have smooth sides with a graphic I would be unwary of how it would look after a year. But for the sake of this post let us assume that a manufacturer could create these cases with a more durable exterior that would have a variety of pleasing graphics available for the sides of the case. If the cases weighed up to 10 pounds and were able to hold around 10 decks how much would you be willing to pay for one? Also, if any other features could be added what would you want? My brothers have suggest having eight 60 card deck slots instead of 10 and having a ninth deck slot for Commander (EDH). I would personally be interested in having some place to put my rares in it. I could see the case being able to be opened on 2 sides, the top would access the decks and the bottom would access 3-hole punch pages of rares (or a binder). Please comment and let me know what you think about deck carrying cases, their features, and how much you would be willing to pay. See you again next week! *I will post a few pictures of my case later for those who have not seen it*

Week 1: Improved Trading Card Sleeves

My friends and I are avid Magic: The Gathering players. There are already a number of popular sleeves. When asked which sleeves are the best the list normally includes: Dragon Shields, KMC sleeves, Ultra Pro sleeves and sometimes one or two other brands. I would like to propose a type of sleeve that does not currently exist that would include 3 innovations:

1. Rounded bottom corners – Currently sleeves are rectangles and while this works fine I think it could be improved if the bottom two corners were rounded. This would help reduce the scratching sleeves get while shuffling and it would make shuffling easier. Why leave the top corners at 90 degrees? Because cards would fit in the sleeve more comfortably and there would be no awkward opening.
2. Rounded sides – I am no engineer nor have I worked with any card sleeve manufacturing technology, so I have no idea whether or not this is possible. Currently sleeves appear to have the clear plastic front “stamped” onto the sleeve and then cut. What if there was a way for sleeves to have no “seam.” Instead sleeves would go from the rough back to the transparent front seamlessly. This would help provide a nicer feel for sleeves, a stronger design and sleeves would be less likely to cut each other while shuffling (not that this is a common problem). The potential problems I see here is the how and whether or not sleeves would not hold the cards firmly enough. Obviously we do not want our cards falling out of the sleeves.
3. Gun metal back – I think it would be nice to have more variety with the types of sleeves that are currently made. Immediately when I think of what I would want with the “ideal” sleeve is to have a nice gun-metal color for the back of the card. The problem here would be uniformity to prevent players from cheating. Another potential problem would be figuring out how to do this (problems with material).

Those are the innovations I would like to discuss regarding current trading card game sleeves. Please discuss here on my blog so that I can see what other people think!