I don't believe it.

It has been three years now that Out of Cards has been online. Although it isn't difficult to put up a webpage on the internet and push out some content onto it and celebrating your "years online" metric, what is hard is keeping that site regularly updated, your community growing, and continuing to increase your quality. We've been doing that since May 28, 2019.

I love the team that we've built up over these few years. We've added on so many great new faces since our time simply focusing on Hearthstone, and although Out of Cards still has Hearthstone as a primary focus, seeing us spread out into more games within the card game genre has been awesome. Our most recent major addition was Yu-Gi-Oh, which Nirast and Fliboce have been doing a great job covering for us. That increased coverage will be continuing with Marvel Snap, Second Dinner's brand new game that was finally announced last week, and I must say, is quite fun to play!

Last year I thanked everyone for being a part of our journey so far and while that still remains true to this day, I'd also like to thank you in advance for being a part of what is to come. You see, Out of Cards has never been my Endgame, and that's not only important because you should always have crazy goals in life, but also because where we're going is going to ultimately make Out of Cards a better place. Today, I'd like to talk a bit about our future plans for not only Out of Cards but also our network as whole.

Out of Cards 2.0

On April 18 of this year, I shared an internal update with the team about our future. We're all quite busy individuals whether that is focusing on creating content for everyone in the community to enjoy or just where our day-to-day lives take us, and normally, we don't get a lot of time to talk about where we're heading. The first big thing that I wanted to talk about was a new logo.

When we first debuted the Out of Cards logo when the site came online, we were met with quite a mixed bag of responses. Some folks found that our mascot, Derpcorn, was too "immature" and we wouldn't be able to be seen as being "professional" unless we changed it immediately. Of course, my response was "it doesn't matter" and I like to think that because we kept it and payed homage to our roots with those fluffy Hearthstone card reveals, we've got an iconic mascot that anyone can recognize. I've never been happy with our logo's wordmark though, and that's the part that is going to be changing.

Derpcorn is not going away, however, our loveable unicorn buddy will be used in a different context and no longer appear beside the Out of Cards name. This isn't a way to make ourselves "more professional", games should be fun and it's important that we have something to remember that by, but rather to further improve our brand's identity. It also plays a bit into another announcement we'll get to in a moment.

Say hello to our new logo! You'll be seeing this at the top of our website in the coming weeks as we rollout a visual update to modernize and make Out of Cards more consistent to use. You've likely already noticed that some changes were made to our news articles and guides this past week, and that's just the first step in our updates. Our new logo gives us a more unique shape to our brand which keeps things exciting and with it being stacked, we can more efficiently use our logo in smaller spaces - something that wasn't very easy with our "longboi".

A new logo and a design revamp isn't the only thing coming with "Out of Cards 2.0". We are going to have some revamped site features as well which aim to help discoverability and management of content. The ultimate goal here is to make the site easier to use and help you get to what you want to see faster. We've been in a bit of a code freeze over the past year with not many updates going out, that's going to be changing as I move out of a content-heavy role and jump back into development.

I don't have any exact plans to share with you yet, but I am excited about what the future holds for site features.

FrostyVoid

If you've looked at the finer details of Out of Cards, you've possibly seen a mention of FrostyVoid. That's the company that owns Out of Cards and is where the future of our website network is going to be.

The gaming space has evolved quite a bit over the past decade, with a move away from dedicated websites with more and more people moving to platforms like Reddit, which are notoriously inconsistent in their moderation and content policies, and Discord which has poor discoverability and ultimately isn't very searchable when you're in need of help. We've also seen an evolution in written gaming content online with a large focus on pushing forward absolute nonsense in hopes of keeping you on webpages longer so you can see as many ads as possible. Why answers to your common questions need to be hidden three quarters down a page that is filled with someone's generic story, I understand but don't like. It's time that we change that, get back to the things that matter, and apply the Out of Cards model elsewhere. 

This year we're going to be launching additional community platforms to create consistency and quality in the gaming space and I'm happy to announce out first project is going to be here very soon (tm).

Introducing Out of Games

We've talked about this one internally for a long time and "Out of Games" which was half placeholder, became a bit of a joke. Ever since that was first conceptualized though, now we can't get away from everyone saying we're the "Out of " brand and we get the craziest mix of domain recommendations that use TLDs that don't exist (sorry, OutOf.Warcraft isn't possible). So, here's our logo.

Out of Games is going to give us the freedom to talk about anything and everything gaming, and that's very exciting. We're going to put our own spin on covering gaming news while keeping out the trash that the "big websites" focus on now (really, do we need television being covered on a gaming website?). I'm really looking forward to creating these new gaming community spaces that live on a website and not the ephemeral nature of Discord.

We've been working hard finalizing our plans with the site and although I don't have much to share today, we're not that far off launching!

If you want to stay in the loop with Out of Games, here's what you can do:

Out of Cards Birthday Site Event

We're not going to be doing a big site event this year for the birthday, but we'll certainly have some fun content coming out. Understandably, things have been quite busy with planning our future and how busy the games we're covering here have been in more recent times, so we've had to put site events on the backburner for now.

We will be bringing back our Merch shop though very soon so you can give us all your money when a particular item people have been asking for since we started the site. I'm also planning on rolling out some updates sooner rather than later to our Premium program which has been in need of some love for some time now. Pricing won't be changing, but we'll be adding new stuff to Premium. We're also going to bring back lifetime site premium as a Birthday special.

Phew, that's a lot to talk about! It's always exciting to talk about the future and now that everything is public, we're going to be held accountable if we don't release anything. *Sweats profusely*.

Stay awesome.

- Flux

P.S. Now that you know about Out of Games, we'd love to know what you don't like about gaming coverage right now. Let us know your thoughts in our survey.