The prototype deck is here!

Mannaz & Wyrd

Hey everyone! Look what arrived yesterday.  (We’ll have prettier daylight photos than these quick cell-phone snaps soon, but we are so excited we couldn’t wait any longer to show you.) 

The linen card finish feels lovely in our hands and is so much easier to shuffle than the less expensive super-glossy cardstock. We’re really glad we were able to make that upgrade.
We’re not thrilled with how the custom-printed tin turned out, so we’re happy that we’ll be going with custom tuck boxes instead! Also pictured: some of the extra cards we’re planning for in each deck. Backers, in your surveys we’ll be asking if/how you’d like to be listed on both the acknowledgement card you see here, and in the thank-you section of the Syllabus.
We’re thrilled with how the cards turned out, but we do have a few tweaks to make now that we see how the colours look printed. We’d like to make the aqua-blue highlight a smidgen brighter, so it stands out better…
…and the violet highlight we used for the additional Anglo-Saxon Futhorc cards blends too well with the hand-hooked artwork and needs to be changed…
… we love how the green looks for the medieval and early-modern bindrune cards, through! We also tried a few divination spreads with the complete deck and we’re so happy with how well it worked.

So, all in all we’re delighted! We’ll be submitting the tweaked images for printing later this week, so we should have the second prototype in its custom tuck-box to show you in two to three weeks’ time. We promise we’ll get out the good camera for those photos.

We also have figured out the add-ons issue! Yes, we’re still going to have to do them manually, but if you wanted to add any extra backer rewards to your shipment, Eira can create a custom listing (with no additional shipping charge) for you in the new Mannaz&Wyrd Etsy shop. We’ll put a line item for that in our backer survey, which we delayed sending out until we had this wrinkle smoothed out. (Watch for that to hit your inboxes tomorrow.)

If you missed pledging for the crowdfunding campaign, you can pre-order all the backer rewards through the Etsy shop (although the resin items will only be available in other colourways, not the KS-exclusive gold-on-gold-on-gold). They’re a smidge more expensive, to cover Etsy’s fees, but still lower than our planned retail price.

We have also taken delivery of our mailer envelopes, and the bandana blanks and madder for the divination cloths. Ravishing Raven Handmade have received all their shipments of safety equipment (resin fumes are no joke, y’all) and raw materials, and are still polishing the polymer-clay masters they made as part of remaking the molds to ensure the dice will be bubble-free.

Finally, we received a couple more out-of-print and university-level reference books to help us fact-check our other sources, level up the quality of our syllabus, and make informed book recommendations. 

Shelfie! This pile doesn’t contain the academic paper PDFs and 9 books on Eira’s Kindle. We’re especially excited to have Michael Barnes’ academic rigour to refer to for the Urd’s Snowflake Syllabus & Interdisciplinary Lesson Plans.

(republished from our 25 Feb 2021 Kickstarter update)

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