OK cool. If it wasn't just you and it turned out that nobody besides me could see them it would've meant I was wasting all my time updating them every day, and the 45 minutes I just spent adding in the auto-count functionality. Good to know it wasn't for nothing
***Sorry, this is going to be a lengthy explanatory post. There's a short, short version at the very bottom if you don't want to read my explanation full of asides and flippant commentary***
Well, it's almost (maybe) time for hockey again (hopefully). But it's also going to be January before things get started (allegedly) and it's a mighty weird time to be a hockey fan. Weird enough that we could use a little fun, and not so weird that it should stop an important HF Sharks tradition, which brings me to why we're here:
Avatars!
Yep, with a season maybe close it's time to get geared up for 20/21. Or is it just "...-21" if they start in January? But since the boredom of months without Sharks hockey, the omnipresent coronavirus, and the continuing malaise of the Sharks being kinda bad at their job lately has made things a little less fun I decided that we needed something a little different to work as a pick-me-up.
That got me thinking: What's one of the fun parts of being a fan? Besides screaming at the TV and steadfastly arguing that you know better than everyone invovled in the game while arguing with complete strangers on the internet?
Well, if you're a kid it might be the simpler times of getting and opening up a pack of hockey cards. And that's what I wanted to replicate. Only without the annoying part where stupid people treat it like an investment and change the market so that it's not for hobbyists anymore and is more for cynical speculators looking to make a buck while driving casual collectors out of the game because of prices and distribution. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
So here's the gist of the idea:
Instead of having a draft where everyone picks a single design that's theirs and theirs alone, or having a set of 20-30 designs and giving everyone free reign to use whatever, I've done something that's probably going to be viewed as being kind of insane.
I made lots of avatars. Like A LOT a lot. Like several hundred. And I'm not exaggerating for effect. I've had pretty much the last 7-10 months to work on this, and I made the most of that time.
The avatars were then randomized into virtual packs of cards that will be given out to the people who want to participate. IF YOU WANT A BATCH OF THIS YEAR'S AVATARS, POST IN THIS THREAD TO LET ME KNOW. Once you've opted in, you'll get a pack via PM from me and will be able to open it up like a pack of actual hockey cards, finding an assortment of avatars within.
Those avatars are yours to use for the season how ever you see fit. Use any or all of them. Trade any or all of them with other users for their avatars. Or trade whatever you want for other peoples' avatars or your avatars for whatever you want from other people. I remember the old avatar drafts where people traded things like beers at games or even tickets to move up in the order and take the player they wanted. I'm not going to be hardcore about enforcing anything myself unless it starts to become problematic or ruin the fun of the concept, but other than that I fully encourage trading like real hockey cards to keep things fun. If you want you can even use none of them, leaving them to sit in your inbox or just give them masses. The decision is yours.
In order to facilitate trading, I will be making a separate thread for people to set up shop for trades and work out deals. This thread should stay on topic of the set itself (including questions and help), requesting packs, and showing off what you got.
So that leads us to the next question: What's in a pack?
I've stolen distribution concepts from another card-based hobby, collectable card games like Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh, to help with how things are divided up. Your pack of 12 avatars is sorted into rarities of avatar that influence distribution as follows:
Common avatars:
The most plentiful avatars in the set are the commons. These are your "base" set covering the breadth of the Sharks/Barracuda organization and are essentially similar to what I might normally release in a regular year where corona isolation doesn't make me crazy enough to create nearly 20 different designs and jam them all together in an orgy of avatar production.
To ensure enough avatars are available and to have sufficient diversity in the set, common avatars have a couple of quirks:
1) Each Sharks/Barracuda player exists in 3 versions: a) a version of them wearing a teal Sharks/Barracuda jersey, b) a version in a white jersey, and c) a version in an alternate jersey (the Stealth jersey, the Cuda oranges, whatever I happen to have found if I was able to find something.). The exception to this is new players who don't have pictures in their San Jose threads yet. For example, Ryan Donato and Devan Dubnyk don't have Sharks images at the moment, so their initial versions in the set depict them in Wild garb. I'll address what this means a little later on.
2) Each version of a given common avatar can exist as up to 4 copies. That means if you get, say, Tomas Hertl in teal (avatar #023, if you're curious) up to 3 other people may get the same avatar in their packs. But since distribution is random it's also entirely possible that maybe only 1 other person gets the same one. Or nobody. Who knows what'll happen.
Each pack comes with 8 common avatars, randomly assorted except that I will control for repeats (meaning you won't get two copies of the same avatar or two different versions of the same player at the common level in the same pack)
Uncommon avatars:
The second tier of avatars are the uncommons. These are a variety of themed sub-sets celebrating aspects of the Sharks past, present, and future. I don't want to spoil too much of the surprise so I won't reveal a whole lot about what's in the uncommon tier, but one example of what you might find at this level are the set's prospect avatars, conceptualized as the equivalent of real-world Rookie Cards.
Unlike, say, Magic, I haven't made a symbol to mark the set and rarity, but in order to keep some visual identification most uncommon sets have design elements cast in a metallic silver foil.
Uncommons are restricted to just 2 copies per design, so whatever you receive at the uncommon level will only have up to one other person a given design/subject with you.
Each pack will have 3 uncommon avatars in it. While I will control for identical duplicates, I will not control for duplication of sets or subjects. So you may find your pack has multiple avatars of different themes depicting the same player, or has multiple players across the same theme (there are, for example, a bunch of packs that have multiple prospect/rookie card avatars in them)
Rare avatars:
The rarest avatar are the rares (of course, right?). Recognizable by gold foil design elements, these are a different variety of sub-set designs from the uncommons. I'm not giving any spoilers about what they encompass though. That's for you people to find out as you all open your packs.
Rares are also notable for the fact that they cannot reappear as duplicates. Every rare handed out is the only version of that design which exists (by which I mean the particular subject. You may get a rare that is one player/subject out of 10 that share that theme, but your version with that specific player will be the only one like it that exists.
Every pack will have 1 rare avatar.
There are some more surprises but I won't spoil them here. If you happen to get those surprises in your packs you're more than welcome to spoil them in my place htough.
As it stands right now I have enough avatars to give out up to 80 packs. Initial asks in this thread are limited to 1 pack per poster. Additional packs may be earned in a variety of ways I haven't decided on yet. Some people will get (and indeed have already been pre-selected for) bonus packs for things they've done in service of this project or the board at large. Others may get them as prizes for contests, challenges, or games that we play on the board. If you've got an idea for something that could use a booster pack prize or a person who you think deserves a thank-you-pack for their contributions to HFSJ, let me know.
I may also choose to intermittently just open a pack on my own and make the contents available for claim or trade for fun.
Since this intro is long and rambling I'll probably keep it up like this for a couple of weeks before I collapse most of it into spoiler tags and only retain the most pertinent info in the open part of the post.
Additionally, the post below this will be used to track the set and distribution.
TL;DR version:
You want avatars? Let me know in this thread and I'll send you a pack of them via PM. Each poster is limited to one (1) pack of avatars via request in this thread. More packs can potentially be earned through other channels which you will find out about in due time.
Also use this thread for showing off what you got to the rest of the board and to ask questions and whatnot. This is not the trades thread. that will go elsewhere to keep things a little bit more organized.
Lots of packs available. As of last night there are still 55 available to give out. I don't expect 55 posters to show up wanting more, but the way I figured it we might get to 35-40 given directly and then I can start offering extras to people through giveaways, contests/competitions, as rewards for whatever, etc.
I'll send you one later this afternoon when I have some free time.
Can it include that goalie retiring directly as well? Maybe call it "Career Ender" or some such. Could prolly get some B. Marchment avis in that set also, maybe Link too?
Today's pack requests might be a bit delayed. My power just went out so I have no wifi and thus no way to get the info off my computer and posted (i don't dare try and do it on my phone. It will end badly)
If it comes back on soon I can get it done but as of now I don't even know what the cause of the outage is, let alone an eta on it being restored.
I blame the snow though. First snowfall of the season. Some idiot probably plowed into a power pole somewhere. BC drivers are kinda crap at handling winter weather.
I don't know why I was thinking about this earlier, but something occurred to me:
We know that Sheng, Kurz, and Brodie all have HF accounts, however infrequently they may use them. So what would be weirder: Them showing up on here to see people potentially sporting avatars with their faces on them? Them showing up and wanting avatars and getting themselves in the pack? Or them showing up, wanting avatars, and not getting themselves in a pack?
I don't know why I was thinking about this earlier, but something occurred to me:
We know that Sheng, Kurz, and Brodie all have HF accounts, however infrequently they may use them. So what would be weirder: Them showing up on here to see people potentially sporting avatars with their faces on them? Them showing up and wanting avatars and getting themselves in the pack? Or them showing up, wanting avatars, and not getting themselves in a pack?
I don't know why I was thinking about this earlier, but something occurred to me:
We know that Sheng, Kurz, and Brodie all have HF accounts, however infrequently they may use them. So what would be weirder: Them showing up on here to see people potentially sporting avatars with their faces on them? Them showing up and wanting avatars and getting themselves in the pack? Or them showing up, wanting avatars, and not getting themselves in a pack?
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