update on the New Tarot

[swan_tower]

I have to admit, it warms the cockles of my heart that in the day or so after I posted about my friend's Kickstarter Project for the "New Tarot," it gained something like seven hundred dollars in pledges. I have no way of knowing how much of that was due to my post, but given that it had been semi-stalled for a little while before then, I'd like to think I had something to do with the boost.

Which is why I'm bringing it up again. See, the project has not reached its funding goal. There are six days to go, and it needs a little less than two grand to cross the line. It would be sad to see the thing come so very close and then fall short, so I thought I'd post a reminder, and encourage you all to spread the word to other people who might be interested. I'd like to see this one hit its mark.

Comments

[rosefox]

I didn't join in because I don't have $25 for a deck and I don't see the purpose of pledging $10 to get a guide to a deck that I don't have. That seems like poor Kickstarter design. I was also hoping to see more diversity in the depicted figures, or at least some statement about how it's not going to be all white conventionally-pretty people in the Major Arcana.

It looks pretty cool and I'm more picky about this sort of thing than most people would be, I'm guessing. I hope your friend makes their goal. It's just not for me.

(I leave feedback here mostly because you can't comment on a Kickstarter page without pledging, which seems to me to be a design flaw. Feel free to pass this along to your friend or not, as you prefer.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think the $10 pledge is for people who don't care about actually using the deck (since it comes with the images of all the cards, just not the cards themselves in shufflable form); they just want to see what it's like. That's a guess, though, since I'm not familiar with what's going on at the back end of the project. As for the figures, all the ones used as examples are personal friends of the deck's creator; the court cards are all offered up as rewards, so they'll look like whoever decides to buy those slots. No idea how the rest of the Major Arcana will be handled, though.

I definitely agree that it should be possible to comment without pledging. I'll pass your concerns along, though.

[thekinginyellow.livejournal.com]

Hey -- this is the deck designer.

The short answer is that, while the indeterminacy of our final publishing strategy means that costs are uncertain, $25 is probably about the amount that will allow us (a) to make and ship a physical copy of the deck while (b) retaining some meaningful portion of the donation to fund the project. A lot of successful Kickstarter projects find that their prize costs almost obliterate all the money they've raised, leaving them virtually where they started, and we'd prefer to avoid that pitfall.

As mentioned on the project page, the guide contains high-quality digital pictures of all the cards in the deck, along with discussions of their meaning. If you're interested in the artwork or the theory of the New Tarot, the guide is a useful thing to have, probably about as useful as the deck itself. If you're trying to get something to use for readings...well, I wish we could sell the deck cheaper, but I don't think we can.