The custom potential would be though the roof, not only with artwork, but with cannon ranks and whatnot. It’s too bad something like this didn’t exist, would have made my day a lot easier.
I just thought of something with cannon ranks and other similar things – sticker sheets in each pack or box for things that are extremely common. For example, the tiny dice markings are so small that you could fit dozens of tiny stickers on a deckplate-sized card that would have multiples of each cannon type, perhaps from 2L-5S. (and some blank in case you wanted 1S, 6L, etc)
Something else, if custom designs were shared, either online o some other format, you could have a situation whee other people buy the blank slate packs to make a copy of a custom ship they saw somewhere else.
Great idea, but I think that could be made even easier with scans that are printable as stickers, or even a colored 3D printed design. Instead of trying to draw out the exact artwork someone else made, simply download the stickers from the web and put them on a blank template to make your own copy. Custom creators could have their own folder of scans or pictures (maybe that photogrammetry mentioned on the Discord could be a useful tool) in an account. They could have some private while they work on designs, and make some public for others to download. Here’s an interesting idea – let people charge for their ideas so they’re incentivized to come up with awesome stuff. Maybe $1-$5 for a the rights to use a custom design. Keeping it always free would be cool too of course haha. Maybe if your free designs are downloaded a certain number of times, you get credits to download premium designs, get a special premade ship without having to purchase it, or you get extra blank packs/cards in the mail for free. So many interesting ways to go with this. Finally, perhaps you could be awarded the custom of the month/year for designing a certain number of customs that get high ratings (such as a 1-5 scale based on not just effectiveness, but also creativity of stats/ability design along with aesthetics). If an online or 3D version came around again, it could be easy to introduce all of the public customs in a database into that virtual world, which is where a lot of gaming seems to be going anyway.
Alright, I’ve officially gone crazy with this topic, but only because I think it has a lot of potential. 😀
@Woelf/anyone who would know: Do you think that printing blank white styrene cards with punchable ship and crew templates without the branding and set name would violate the patent(s)? I assumed so because ideally the design itself would be identical, but it’s intriguing to think about. (such as a very simple no-name box of 3 masted ship cards all white with no associated info to the old game)
This actually might have reasonable potential as a stopgap measure if the legal stuff never resolves itself, but those same legal issues could be what dooms it in the first place.