UC acquired by Portfolio52

[hsbc]

Per Lorenzo on his Patreon

[bdawg923]

What does this mean for the site. Any background on why it happened? Any changes coming? (Question posed to the admins. I saw the patreon post as well, and it was light on details).

[Bradius]

Maybe will be changing the name to "United Seasoning"? Not sure. I am sure more details to come. Hopefully this means Mike will have more time to join the chats.

[rousselle]

Hi, all.

Mike's router business venture is taking off and so his attention has been elsewhere. As such, he has decided to find another caretaker for the UC, and Alex Chin of Portfolio52 and Seasons Playing Cards fame has agreed to step into that role. Portfolio52 has officially bought the UC assets and is taking over as the curator of the forum, going forward.

Per Alex: "this transition is a step towards creating a centralized hub for card collecting bringing the card community as a whole together. This connection with P52 opens up a whole new world of possibilities to help make referencing easier. Bringing UC and P52 together is a small step towards a larger goal of reinvigorating deeper conversations and creating safe spaces to enjoy cards that forum style discussion can still provide in a social media algorithmic world."

I'm sure you can anticipate hearing more from Alex in the weeks and months ahead regarding his plans for both UC and P52. In the meantime, UC remains your friendly neighborhood hang-out for fans of playing cards, card magic, and cardistry.

[IAmTheChin]

Hi guys,

I wanted to pop a more official announcement here but it looks like I got beat to the punch haha. Rousselle has the TLDR version above. Basically it's been a long time coming that the tools of card collecting would merge with the social abilities of this forum to become a more cohesive experience. P52 and UC has worked closely together for a while now, most notably with the DOTYs and bringing things together under one brand is meant to help bring some cohesion to the card collecting experience, and of course more exciting growth.

What does this mean for the site

In the short term, nothing significant will change on the front end. After a lot of thought I believe it to be in the best interest to keep things as is for the next few months until the new year to avoid any confusion with changing UX. The domain and visual feel will continue to be the same during this time but will eventually all be under the P52 roof. We may begin testing a few things out but for the most part we wanted to save any large scale changes for the new year. The biggest priority right now is launching the official debut P52 deck with Lorenzo for the Odd Fellows campaign that we've been working together for the past couple months as well as preparing for the DOTYs.

This all being said, we are at a very exciting point as a community in this journey. With the sites combined in the future as a centralized hub certain feature possibilities become more feasible. It's during this time that I would love to hear your perfect idea of what a 10 star card collecting experience would be. Now would be the time to be vocal and help bring notice to anything you've ever thought would be cool if it was possible. While I can't promise the world, we can always start from somewhere, and I'd prefer it if it was from our beloved community directly.

Sincerely,
-Alex

[laitostarr777]

At first I heard rumors about this
But now, the rumors become real!
This is such a BIG MOVE! I wonder how things will be integrated

[hsbc]

Now would be the time to be vocal and help bring notice to anything you've ever thought would be cool if it was possible. While I can't promise the world, we can always start from somewhere, and I'd prefer it if it was from our beloved community directly.

P52 needs organization - e.g. there should be a Kings Wild page, with each deck (not each version of each deck!) listed. You should also be able to sort/filter by (at least) year, artist, printer, gilding, gilding color, seal, marked, border style, card size, theme, print run..... and series (Table Players, Magna Carta) should have their own pages too

And we need an export option, ideally not only for our own pages and uploads but for the whole site

It would be nice to be able to be able to sort decks into multiple/unlimited personal collections too (e.g. wishlist, favorite Seasons decks, worst Anyone decks, etc.)

[Strag]

Maybe make this a sticky across forums? If I hadn't seen the Patreon post by Lorenzo I wouldn't have known this was happening as I rarely visit this area.

I wish Alex the best of luck and hope we see bigger and better things going forward for UC!

[IAmTheChin]

Maybe make this a sticky across forums? If I hadn't seen the Patreon post by Lorenzo I wouldn't have known this was happening as I rarely visit this area.

Forums in general are a different species to the current UX of today. Would you be interested in seeing threads and topics as thumbnails to navigate by on a home page? Or alternatively if conversations about decks would be on deck pages, would you prefer to see the decks themselves like on P52, except when clicking the deck in the forum section it would pull up the thread?

[hsbc]

Forums in general are a different species to the current UX of today.

This is UC's main appeal to me

[Strag]

Maybe make this a sticky across forums? If I hadn't seen the Patreon post by Lorenzo I wouldn't have known this was happening as I rarely visit this area.

Forums in general are a different species to the current UX of today. Would you be interested in seeing threads and topics as thumbnails to navigate by on a home page? Or alternatively if conversations about decks would be on deck pages, would you prefer to see the decks themselves like on P52, except when clicking the deck in the forum section it would pull up the thread?

Gave this one a lot of thought as I didn't want to rush my thinking about it. I don't think threads and topics as a thumbnail would work that well for the way the forum is structured as-is. Hard to envision had this would work for the kinds of topics that we have now, would only seem to work for deck-specific threads. That is, of course, if your goals for the site include some level of the same sort of engagement there is today.

This site can be and is about more than just deck and designer topics and you might lose those parts of discussion with a different ux. This happens to be my profession (Product) and this sort of change really needs careful thought IMO. Would definitely help if you could point to other discussion sites that have a layout like you are proposing.

Whenever you are considering design changes it's good to understand the underlying data (how users are currently using your product) and also what they are telling you (the things that they want that they don't have but also what is working well or could be even better).

Of course you should first start with what is the problem you are trying to solve or opportunity to take advantage of (I'm assuming that you must have some idea of this when you bought it from Mike) and also what good looks like when you do solve the problem and how you are going to measure success (what are your KPIs or metrics, do you want more users, do you want more engagement from existing users, more posts per day or whatever) and of course what is your overall strategy and how would a change in ux help you to execute on that strategy and achieve your oveall goals.

Change for the sake of change is never a good idea without really understanding the above.

[EvilDuncan]

Forums in general are a different species to the current UX of today.

This is UC's main appeal to me

Very much agree. I'm sure there are additional features you could implement in the existing UX, but I quite like the way it looks and functions now. Part of it is probably nostalgia, but I quite enjoy the current layout.

[EndersGame]

Congratulations Alex, and best wishes with this new endeavour. It's hard to think of a more talented, experienced, and suitable guy than Alex Chin for a role like this.

Does this have any implications for the upcoming National Playing Card Collection Day on October 17? And are there any plans for a NPCCD deck to be released on that date this year?

I'm guessing that perhaps instead of the usual Alex Chin designed NPCCD deck, this year's event may coincide with the launch of the Portfolio52 debut deck (Odd Fellows Playing Cards)?

[kasuma99]

I hope Odd fellows and NPCCD 2021 are not one and the same. I m looking forward to both series and if that happens, it will be like kids having birthday on Xmas: One present for both.

[jerichoholic]

So any news or updates on what is happening?

[jerichoholic]

So it's been like what 2 years now and nothing ever happened? It's long overdue the 2 sites are merged into one, it could be like Board Game Geek but for playing cards.

[Harvonsgard]

P52 might be good intentioned and ambitious but I personally don't care for it so, I'm pretty happy with UC still being UC.

[kevork]

So it's been like what 2 years now and nothing ever happened? It's long overdue the 2 sites are merged into one, it could be like Board Game Geek but for playing cards.

What would be the incentive for UC to do something like that, aside from foot traffic? If we want more foot traffic, P52 should place a "forum" link on their main page that directs here.

[bdawg923]

So it's been like what 2 years now and nothing ever happened? It's long overdue the 2 sites are merged into one, it could be like Board Game Geek but for playing cards.

What would be the incentive for UC to do something like that, aside from foot traffic? If we want more foot traffic, P52 should place a "forum" link on their main page that directs here.

P52 owns UC so it's not like UC has the incentive. if Alex Chin wants to do anything to UC, it's his forum. He's the owner

[Bradius]

Alex is the leader. He has upturned our whole organization. The former leaders were put on spikes and those that remained have given our oath of fealty to the Dark Lord with our blood....




Sorry, watching the Lord of the Rings on Netflix