Quote:
Originally Posted by UpperDeckMatt
This is absolutely not the case. Some artists turned in cards faster than others. Any late artists that missed the packaging for the hobby release were used in e-Pack. This is not a standard practice and something I try to avoid. All prior hybrid releases between hobby and e-Pack had a split of all sketch card artist to be present in both. Our goal is to have an even representation of all artist across all product releases regardless of Hobby or e-Pack.
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Well, this certainly puts UD in a pickle. Why didn't UD consider redemptions or a brief delay to packaging the hobby release?
I am by no means a card industry insider, but it seems that your largest competitor uses redemption cards pretty liberally when they don't have hits in hand at packaging time. Probably a bigger deal to push back packaging, but products have been pushed back schedule-wise before, especially when your actual release date coincides with a giant hype-machine release like Star Wars 40th Anniversary. You should at least have been cognizant of the May-the-4th significance.
It's clear to me that UD did not have confidence that the sketches would be received AT ALL and so by accepting late sketches, they proceeded to add the late arrivals to e-packs, thus loading that product. This is a terrible outcome for physical product collectors.