To be honest, there were probably people who created Kickstarter accounts just to back his campaign due to the success of the initial release of the deck. The same could be said of any given CMON board game campaign. I didn't start using Kickstarter until I saw an announcement for a board game that I was already familiar with the publisher and designer. So, just because an account is less active or new on a campaign does not mean it's a bot or a "dummy" account. That's pretty thin. I think my KS profile is still the "default" one and I'm a "superbacker."I feel like half of ithe 5,100 backer are just majority reseller or extra dummy account in hope to get the extra foil deck ($26)....why because when i clicked on about 12 to 16 (yes small as sample) default profile account i only see recently made account with 1 backed (mint 2) or old account which only have 1-2 project backed. The remaining majority are just lurkers which once in awhile will back
In fact, to pledge, you'd have to have a valid credit card number, because even though the card isn't charged the number is validated, so Asad or someone possibly acting in consort with Asad would need to have a bot net and access to long list of stolen credit card numbers. I don't know that fluffing the pledges on a KS campaign would really be worth the potential consequences. Not to mention, what does the creator gain from that? Less money raised from the campaign to print cards there's already a demand for?
I could see maybe some enterprising individuals going out of their way to get around the brick-per-backer by creating secondary accounts for additional pledges. Possibly I could see your theory working in this case, however, I'm not sure someone motivated and thoughtful enough would go to such lengths realizing that their efforts only end up diluting their own ability to profiteer from them.
I'm probably splitting hairs here, but I don't think Asad or backers on this campaign are as nefarious as some in this thread have suggested. Some of the stuff he's done is probably because he wasn't honestly expecting the demand that we're now seeing exists for his decks and that Kickstarter as a platform certainly has many limitations. Like, I don't think he's out to be like "eff it, some backers just won't get the foiled decks that they pledged for," (while twirling his mustache) it's literally because the way the campaign is structured he has no way of "reserving" items by user or limiting the number of users pledging for those items because of the way the pledge tiers were initially structured. Keeping in mind the foiled decks were an after thought in the campaign, and because he got overwhelming feedback from backers to create something like that. I'm actually surprised at his agility in responding to backer feedback and trying to produce products people want. This is only his second Kickstarter campaign, so yeah, something of this magnitude with his experience I'm not surprised there are a couple of not-so-well-thought-out hiccups, but to assume that it's because he wants to be manipulative or "greedy," that's a pretty big stretch. (newsflash: the impetus for anyone to create something that you consume is "greed," so good luck doing the mental acrobatics in your head to reasonably justify any product you purchase-- in fact, I'm pretty sure most of us here have jobs or have had jobs and I'm sure we don't do/didn't do them for free)
After initially lowering my pledge to one of each, I saw the announcement for the Collector tier this afternoon, so I jumped on it as soon as I saw the update. I really wanted one of those prototypes, and the fact that you get a discount on all of the other decks isn't bad, either.