Tyrian Tarot

Mon Aug 20 '18 Announcement
over 5 years ago – Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 01:47:42 PM

Hello lovely adventurers!

I have a short general update for you just to keep you posted of our journey together! The targets have not changed for shipping (books! are! here!), but I'll recap them at the end of this for anyone who missed the previous update. (That said, if you missed the problems that happened due to our printer's vendors, please read the last update. While it hasn't impacted us greatly, it has pushed some dates backward.)

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE:

We've confirmed a $42,000 donation to the International Fund for Animal Welfare at the beginning of October. Thank you and congratulations.

Continuing on about money:

>>>> Patreon link.
If you weren't aware, the staff of the Guild Wars 2 Artist Collective work for free. While we're working to remedy that in projects in 2019 (there are a lot of agreements and whatnot), we'll still be working strictly for charity when it comes to moderation itself for the rest of 2018.

To put that in perspective for anyone who isn't familiar with publishing/organizing, I personally put in about 1,500 hours without pay from August 2017 (starting with WDZ 2017) to today, and will probably break close to 2,000 hours by the time Tyrian Tarot has finished shipping. For the last 8 months, I've been working 80-85 hours a week, and last week, I put in my 2-week notice at my publishing job to make sure that I could fulfill my promise to all of you for the remainder of the year.  (It was incredibly draining to do both -- ultimately, health is important!)

My lead designer and I have set up a Patreon related to these projects - for TT, the Wintersday Zine and future items; we'd be grateful if you'd take a look or share. We have items such as updates for Collector's Editions (first nab) and specialty items, potential discounts, and bookmarks, along with an assortment of other items.

You can check out the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/gw2collective

If you can't subscribe, but are on social media, shares would be appreciated on:
Tumblr: https://gw2collective.tumblr.com/post/177209440613/guild-wars-2-artist-collective-is-creating
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GW2Collective/status/1031617242868408320

Fluff Pictures (if you missed it on social):

Shipping Recap:

For those of you who missed the shipping recap from the last update, let me just start by saying that the first batch of send outs is still on schedule (original estimated send was August 30, 2018). Since there are 3,000 packages between Indiegogo and the post-campaign store, it will take some time to complete (about a month).

We recognize that the overwhelming number of packages themselves will be something we'll address if we have another project in 2019 -- there will be tiers with monthly shipments so that everyone is better adjusted to how long all the packages take to send. I know if you've never done it it's hard to think about... but imagine wrapping your Christmas gifts... 3,000 times.

At the time, we just hadn't recognized that we'd get so many of you... which is truly a blessing. It's definitely a lesson to not underestimate; we just couldn't change it once we'd launched. I'm sorry it's taking longer since it's just two people, and we will accommodate for that in the future! 

So, schedule:

The US is slightly ahead of the EU due to shipping/receiving times. They're getting there... just on a train. Somewhere in Europe. As a reminder if you're in Europe, YOU DO NOT PAY CUSTOMS. We have paid them for you. If someone is trying to force you... they're wrong?

The order:

> Contributors
> Commissions
> The World
> The Sun
> The Moon
> The Star
> The Fool: Early Bird
> Chariot
> Hanged Man/Temperance
> Preorders
> Lovers
> The Fool

The Wheel of Fortune goes out the few days after I return from PAX (after Sept. 3rd). We pick them up directly from the ArenaNet office and ship them to you. :D

That's all we have for now. The next time you hear from me, it'll be with pictures of the deck and cloths (but you can watch social media -- they'll be up there soon). 

Sun Aug 5 '18 Announcement
over 5 years ago – Sun, Aug 05, 2018 at 02:05:16 PM

Note: This is Part 2 of Update 24. Please make sure you read the first section first (sent just before this).

Shipping is a bit of a crazy beast, so we're doing our best to contain/control the elements that we can.

The Positive News:

Both the NA and EU systems are both complex to keep your shipping costs low. If you got one of the single tiers, you only paid $9-$12 for each mailing, opposed to the $35 we had quoted for an outbound shipment to the EU for a single unit from the U.S. While we think we’ve gotten all of the kinks out of the system, if you have a question or think something is in error, just ask. Our team wants to communicate with you!

The Negative News:

As I mentioned before, we had two updates concerning PrintNinja and their decks. Since the deck and books are tied together, one can’t ship before the other does, so we’re now waiting on the decks. Why? PrintNinja’s vendors not communicating with them.

I currently have no positive things to say about the current situation, so bear with me as I try to explain. This is a lot of technicalities listed below just so you understand (and the company is aware that I’m elaborating), but feel free to jump to the end.

> On Monday, July 23rd, I requested an update on printing. The decks were supposed to be nearing completion according to their timescale. The manager didn’t know, so he sent in an inquiry.

> On Tuesday, July 24th, he followed up explaining some serious news: The vendor had “run out of cardstock” and it would take them 10 days to restock. He called it a “small bump” at the time. Losing two weeks of scheduled production time is not a small bump. I asked when the “10 days to restock” started, because it should have occurred the moment we submitted our final order almost a month prior. They weren’t clear on that answer.

> On Thursday, July 26th, the contact clarifies that their vendor hasn’t started the order at all, and will “they will move your order to the head of the queue so they can get the cards out the door as fast as they possibly can”. He gives us a new finalized finish date of August 15th, which is far later than originally anticipated. We explain that this is unacceptable and it impacts not just them, but us as well (obviously).

> Same day, after a phone call: I make a request to expedite a portion of the books and decks.

> On Wednesday, August 1st, I finally hear back with numbers and a status update. They’ve pushed back their estimate (again) to August 20th, but we’ll be shipping some items ahead to meet PAX items (book signing) and a few other things. They are paying for this expense.

> On Thursday, August 2nd, I went back through and detailed the problem; having been over a month, there was (and is) no excuse for the printer not having enough stock. Between the 2 week delay on the card edging and the month delay with the stock, I’m just grateful that their quality is not something I question. Despite all of this ridiculousness from the printer, you guys will get the quality you deserve and we will make sure of that.

> On Friday, August 3rd, I received an email back addressing the issues, to quote: “The timeline issue, lack of clarity, and a seemingly constant stream of inaccurate information is sincerely disappointing. I am completely with you, and I too, am also really disappointed. I've really enjoyed working with you and I know how much work you've put into this project and on a professional and personal level, I want to express how sorry I am that we're in this situation.”

That's the last correspondence I have as of current.

(One of our staff members battling her cat. She lost.)

What Does That Mean?

When prepping our timeline, I put a three week buffer in for time in our August 30th date. I’d been hoping to not use it. Obviously, the six weeks the manufacturer has delayed the process is more than that by a long stretch. In a perfect world, we would have begun fulfillment in mid-August. For the last Wintersday Zine, I did fulfillment alone for 400 books in five days to meet our listed mailing… and did it. I really wish this was something we could control, and it’s incredibly disappointing to me as an organizer to deliver news like this.

Unfortunately, none of this is up to us. We’ve expedited as many copies as we could by pulling funds from other areas where we managed to save, so now it’s up to the manufacturer to keep to their last projected timeline.

The expedited portions will hit our door at the end of this month, and I’ll be working to get those out as soon as I can. The rest of them are shipped normally, and it could arrive anywhere from the first week of September to the middle of September. The minute we have the second shipment, we’ll absolutely inform you. We earnestly wish we could do more to speed up the process, but it’s beyond our current control.

Take some sunshine.

TL;DR of this entire thing:

Everything in pre-shipment is completed, but the manufacturer for the decks greatly errored and forced a ridiculously long delay. We’ve been working to fix what we can. The first packages will still go out as planned at the end of the month, but some might not be shipped until the middle of September.

Please let us know if there are any shipping adjustments we can accommodate. We’re currently trying to finesse some extensions of time for the space we rented out to accommodate our process, along with making sure as many of the other items go as planned.

I’m still sure that you’ll love this project and all the work the artists have done. I know you guys are excited (and a little nervous about getting packages), and I really appreciate you all for following our updates. The continued support means a lot, and we’re working as diligently as we can to get everything to you as soon as we can, despite the huge error the printer caused for our timing.

Charity Donation

In more exciting news... We’re scheduled to donate at the beginning of October. Financially, everything has gone as planned and to budget, with no bumps. We're also nearing the end of our required expenses (including shipping, as I've fronted most of that money already). 

Our donation will be over the $30,000 promised. :)

For now...

We'll be waiting until the middle of the month before we have anything further. Thank you for your patience and understanding. We really love all of you. <3

- Mel & the GW2 Artist Collective

Sun Aug 5 '18 Announcement
over 5 years ago – Sun, Aug 05, 2018 at 02:02:50 PM

Hello dear adventurers!

Please note there are two parts to this update. Thank you!

I’m sorry for the delay in communications. As we noted earlier, Indiegogo had gone down with updates, and just recently confirmed that it was up and running again. I’m sorry to everyone who didn’t get any of our last updates (or the social media updates since we transitioned over there for the last three weeks while the issues were occurring). Thank you for your patience and understanding there - not being able to contact you outside of hand mailing was a problem, and we’re glad the issue is fixed.

So some recap items that we’ve posted on social media over the last few weeks:

> The tarot cloth is made of full silk satin, 22 inches square. We’ve had nine samples done and checked. They’re gorgeous and high quality, but they look amazing. Photos for these will come in the next update.

> We closed down the print store and purchased the necessary prints. Due to our minimums, we have some available still, & we had a slight change of plan: due to the lack of space with over 3,000 boxes, we’ve chosen to mail these early to minimize the chance of any damage occurring. If you have any interest in the extras, shoot an email to [email protected]. NA only.

> We’ve mailed out The Tower tiers for NA as well. We’re finalizing paperwork for the EU mailing system as well.

The prints below are still available, NA only. They are $35 for the 11”x17”, $22.50 for the 8”x12”, fine art quality, archival inks. Proceeds go to the artists.

In terms of items arriving, outside of the deck and the book, everything has come in as scheduled! I’ve had everything from a 48-foot semi pulling into my circle to a USPS man sighing at me loudly (sorry, mister).

We’ve very excited that all of these have come in, and they’re even more stunning in person than they are over any photo… but here’s some photo love:

Production Update (The Decks):

There are two major updates that I have to give you today concerning the entire process, and both of them involve our deck manufacturer, PrintNinja. This hasn’t been the first time I’ve worked with them in a project, and I’d assumed that their familiarity with decks matched their proficiency in books. Their books are top notch - I firmly believe that are few in the industry that match up to them, but I’ve found (along with chatting with others) that their deck-making skills still need some work in terms of communication. I don’t doubt that the quality of the end product will be world class, but getting there has been one of the biggest pains I’ve ever encountered in printing (and I’ve been doing this for nine years, if that says anything).

With the decks themselves, we’ve had some adjustments. I was informed in late June (over a month and a week after the campaign had ended) that the gilding would not stick to the varnish we had ordered (the matte anti-scratch lamination). This was attributed to an email error where the representative had emailed himself over me, then forgot to follow up on the time-sensitive issue until it came up in passing over an email where I told him I had no idea what he was talking about and he realized his error. It lost us about 2 weeks of time because we had to have samples flown in from China.

The long winding story here is that we were given a choice: Go gloss and keep the gilding, or go matte and have painted edges instead. The painted edges, next to all of the foil stamping we have in the project, looked incredibly cheap, as if someone had taken a gold sharpie and run across the edges. Because of that, we opted to swap our finishing surface over losing our stretch goal of the gilding.

(Example below of gilding versus painted. It's very apparent in person.)

They will still look fantastic, and they’re still on 330 black core stock that we’d promised, and we keep the gilding we promised as well. We really apologize, and we were informed of this after we’d already paid the company and begun to process files. It was incredibly poor communication from their vendors to PrintNinja, and from them to us. However, I want to assure you that the cards themselves are beautiful, regardless of the finish.

As for the books: As I noted, PrintNinja is much better with their books. The books completed before the decks, but the problem comes that these items ship together… so let’s talk about shipping.

Shipping Update (Everything):

Our initial target date for shipment was August 30, 2018. There are two people handling fulfillment - as with everything, we’re a small fan group, and we don’t use fulfillment since these orders are incredibly complex. Nearly 80% of you added or adjusted something in your order through add-ons, which was fantastic. That said, it does mean that we can’t ask a fulfillment company to do it; we do it by hand, one at a time.

In terms of fulfillment progress, we’ve completely finished our pre-assortment as of last night. Everything is ordered according to tier then name, and sorted by section. All invoices have been printed and pack lists readied. EU shipments have arrived (and are similarly organized and ready to be sent out). All boxes are built and ready to be on their merry way. On our end, we are ahead of schedule. The minute decks and books hit our door, we’ll be starting fulfillment.

Before I get into any nitty gritty, let me start by saying that our first orders are still scheduled to go out around August 27th, 2018 for North America (CAN/US/PR). This is on time as per our initial target date.

We will be working through the tiers through the order below, alphabetically. If you have an outstanding reason that your deck/package needs to go earlier for some reason, let us know.

> The Contributors
> The World
> The Early Birds (Star/Fool Early Bird)
> The Sun/Moon
> Commissions
> The Chariot
> The Hanged Man/Temperance
> The Lovers
> The Fool

It takes time to hand fulfill packages. Imagine your Christmas mailing… then doing 3,000 packages worth of that (send us coffee?). Emailing us at this point will not make your package arrive any sooner, but we’re always happy to answer anything outside of the norm. If you have a sudden shipping change, feel free to contact us directly and we’ll do our best to accommodate you. Please make sure you do this as soon as you know of an issue; you can contact us and we can put packages on hold if your location is in a state of flux.

When your package is readied for shipment and about to hit the mail stream, you will be notified via email. It’s automated once we go in and generate your final shipment request, and from the time we enter that information in, we mail it out within four days.

A picture of what a tracking/notification email looks like:

If you need any information like weights, please contact us after you get this notification. It's logged into our system once we generate these mailing labels.

[PLEASE NOTE: This is continued in the next update. Indiegogo has a character limit that was near half of what I was trying to communicate.]

Sat Jul 14 '18 Announcement
almost 6 years ago – Sat, Jul 14, 2018 at 08:01:14 AM

Hello hello! Many apologies if you didn't receive the email about our last post - I've contacted support, and they don't know why most of you didn't get the update alert. So, that said, I'm back again and will reiterate a few things... but we have more product updates!

Important Reminders:

>> Shipping Lock: this happens tomorrow night! If you're moving soon or have moved recently (since you filled out your info) make sure your info is correct. Make sure you have the right address on Backerkit. Have issues? Email us: [email protected]

>> The large print store closes tomorrow. The proceeds go to the artists to support what they do, and ... you get large prints of gorgeous pieces!

 Extra Pins:

We had a few extra pins that were released after doing some order counts and starting to receive them. You can see the full image of all of the pins below, but we just got Eternity in our hands yesterday!

As you can see, the color varies with each pin! Some will be more blue, while others are more pink. We actually sized these pins up slightly, since the handle was taking up a lot of space, so they're a tiny bit taller than 2" (but the blade portion and hilt all fit on a standard strap still!).

As we noted before, there are extra pins, but only so many remaining (please check the last post for the super long image of all pins):

​Of the basic pins, after safety allotments, we have:

> 22 Black Lion Trading Coin Pins ($7 each)
> 11 Mastery Laurel Pins ($7 each)
> 34 Apples for Tybalt Pins ($7 each)
> An excess of World Completion Pins ($7 each)

We are SOLD OUT of the Griffon & Res Me pins. Sorry!

For the legendary pins ($10 each):

> 9 Eternity Pins (each unique)
> 19 Flameseeker Pins (glows in the dark!)

You can order extra by emailing [email protected] with your request. I'll usually respond within the hour (unless I'm asleep - I do that sometimes). I'll be cutting off extra requests when we go into the shipping lock tomorrow night, as that's when we generate the pack lists. 

We also got some of our specialty CMYK foil thank you cards in today. Normal packages in the campaign got our silk textured variants of these, but if you ordered The World, the Promo packs (Sun/Moon/Early Bird), are a Contributor, or Wheel of Fortune (or added a gift note/extra), you'll get one of these. Blank versions are fully mailable.

CMYK foil creates a metallic glimmer/glitter over the sky and the box, while the UV you can see pops out the glows.

This one is a bit hard to see via just an image, but we've posted videos to Twitter and Tumblr if you'd like to check them out!

And yes, I'm writing all of the notes by hand. Note time! :)

That's all for right now. Have a fantastic weekend! :)

Thu Jul 12 '18 Announcement
almost 6 years ago – Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 11:25:29 AM

Hello adventurers! Fast update again! The takeaway if you only have 2 seconds today is that everything concerning Tyrian Tarot goes into a lock on July 15th... this includes:

>> Extra pins (see below) are available via email until then.

>> Shipping lock: Moving soon? Make sure you have the right address on Backerkit. Have issues? Email us: [email protected]

>> The large print store, benefitting the artists, closes Sunday! Want an assortment of environments, a huge dragon, or an Exalted? Please check it out! These are all fine art quality, made to last, and will be shipped out in early September.

That said, if you're wanting to participate in our winter project, the Wintersday Fanzine... don't forget! Apps close in 8 days for writers, artists and comic creators (see apps here). If you want to be on the mailing list to get your own copy, click here.

SO FUN THINGS! All of our pins are on the way, either waiting for processing (customs, tick tock) or in shipping. That means we have some final numbers in that regard, and we do have a selection of extras of each of the pins (as we ordered a few extra of each to round out our numbers after a safety margin). 

THAT SAID:

>> If you have a pin that you didn't get, but want, please email us: gw2collective.com and say which you'd like. You must have an active order of at least the deck.

>> We will not do swaps of pins, only additions.

>> We will take love and lots of excitement because these pins look awesome. :o (Sorry if some of the pictures aren't the best... there will be more soon that are hi-res!)

The full list of pins are:

• Black Lion Trading Coin
• Mastery Laurel
• Eternity (Unique - rainbow anodized)
• Flameseeker Prophecies (Glows in the dark - blue)
• Catmander Griffon
• World Completion 
• Res Me
• Apples for Tybalt

Each come with a foiled backing card.

Thanks to all of you for being as excited about these as we are. :D