Companies that design and produce large format signs and billboards have a rule about their designs. It is called the 6 second rule. It basically states that if your target audience can’t read and understand your message in 6 seconds, your message will be lost and your advertising campaign is a bust.

I apply that same principle to all of our package designs at Legion. We only have 6 seconds to grab a customers attention. If we can’t create a compelling reason for them to pick up our product, we have failed.

The marketplace for our products is filled with a great deal of visual noise.  From brightly colored anime and fantastical dragons to pink and purple ponies. The visual noise is everywhere, creating a challenging environment for our products to be noticed.

To that end, I strive to create compelling, yet simple and effective solutions for all of our packaging needs.

Let’s start with our Elder Dragon Vault boxes from last year.

The effectiveness of this design was evident from the beginning when our manufacturer sent me a one word response to my design, “wow”. So many people have spoken with me about their love of the box and how they kept it to put it on their shelf or to store their Vault when not in use. The package conveyed perfectly what the product was and also allowed customers to see and feel the product inside.

I have continued that design style into our next offering arriving later this year, another textured dragon hide box we are branding as the Elder Dragon Hoard.

I feel that this design will certainly get noticed and, again, allow our customers to see and feel the actual product inside. I wanted the product to literally jump off the shelf and grab the customers attention. The black and white design with just flashes of color will really stand out against the visual noise of the other products sharing the same space, hopefully catching your eye in less than 6 seconds…

The Elder Dragon Hoards will be available later this year on our website, legionsupplies.com/store and through your local retailers. As we get closer to the release date, we will make an announcement on Twitter, Facebook and our website.

All images and text are © Copyright, 2014. Legion Supplies™ Inc. All Rights Reserved.

With Gen Con just over 100 days away we at Legion Supplies thought you might like to take a sneak peek at the exclusive Gen Con promotional sleeve. Expected in our online store around June 1st 2014!

Thanks to you, our fans and customers, we’ve been continuing to grow at a breakneck pace.  I’m trying to keep up and just haven’t been able to! So it is with much rejoicing (mostly from my wife, who misses me… I work too much) that I proudly announce that Legion Supplies has hired 2 new employees!

John Pelcak will become our new Production Manager. John is an old school Minnesota magic player and former Magic Pro Tour regular. After spending a few years in china doing some intermediary work for US companies and Chinese factories he has come back home and is looking for a new challenge. He will interface with our factories and manage the production jobs to get us a bit more streamlined and help us make and KEEP a timeline for our releases. John will come aboard in just 10 short days at the end of April.

John Port will take over as Warehouse Manager.  John has spent the last 5 years working for Target predominantly in the foods section handling all of the daily inventory needs. He’s about to graduate with his business degree and will be moving up to Minnesota from Madison WI in the next couple weeks.  He’s got a ridiculous work ethic (no idea where that came from) and is looking forward to coming to work for the old man! (no, really, he is). John will join us in early may once he’s crushed his last final.

That means new jobs for the employees we DID have!

Eric Hawkins will be handing off warehouse duties to John (the latter) then transitioning to Sales, Marketing and Customer Service.  He’ll be your first line of defense when you have an issue and he’ll be handling the expanding of our social media presence.  If any of you have met Eric at the couple cons we’ve attended, you know he’s great and easy to talk to and I expect he’ll make all of our lives easier once he takes over communication with distributors and direct customers.

Neal Rasmussen will be continuing on as our entire Graphic Design department,  He is currently functioning as the primary contact for the production management side of things. While he’s enjoyed the challenge, he’s really looking forward to getting back to focusing on great new designs for us to produce. He’ll hand off production management to John (the former) and get back to the thing he does best! (and maybe we’ll get to see some of those design blog posts he promised me last year!)

I know everyone on the team is excited as we grow into this next phase of Legion Supplies.  5 short years ago I made my first order for 4000 packs of sleeves and 4000 deck boxes. We’ve grown to be bringing in pallets and pallets of materials every month with great new designs our customers really love. We’ll love innovating, and the new employees will give us time to get back to that!

Thank you all so much for your continued support, we can’t wait to show you whats coming up next!

Steve Port
President
Legion Supplies

I recently played with Magic the Gathering Hall of Famer Bob Maher and notable deck builder/avid board gamer, Brian Kowal, who both enjoyed their game. Bob won, of course, and Bob had this to say: “There’s nothing else like it on the market, it fills a currently empty niche”.

Legion Supplies launched our first kick starter to publish Foretold, our first board game, 1 week ago today.  We hit 20% funding very quickly and have moved up to 50% funding in just 1 week.  We think it’s a lot of fun and the expansion possibilities are great. It’s very exciting and we’re all super proud of the game. It was developed by Magic Cruise Alum, Jay Semerad. Jay has a background in the video game industry but this is his first board game. He’s come out of the box hard with a great concept that wraps you up and takes you on a fun ride.

The game has a deck-building element at its core, but you don’t ever actually build a deck! You’re drafting cards to play and you get to choose which ones you play in what formation.  It adds a tower defense mechanism to the game as you attempt to conquer tiles in your opponents’ temples to reach their temple’s heart and smite the power that lives there! The cards you purchase are grouped into a raiding party or temple defenders. Finally there are Fate cards and relics which are spells and items you can use through out the game at various times to change combat outcomes, aid a political ally, or save yourself from certain doom!

When it’s all put together the game plays a lot like EDH, and allows for dozens of different strategies and some pretty crazy combos. I’ve been having a riot playing it, and I think a testament to the fun of the game is how much time we spend after the game reliving the game we just played!  We’re hosting a live play demo on Sunday night on Legion Games Twitch TV broadcast channel. We threw one together last Sunday and it was a lot of fun! We were in a busy store with limited microphones available so you only got to hear me. The feed will be much improved this week as we come to you from a quite store after hours and will have full mic on all players. If you’d like to watch our original demo video, it can be found here.

I’ve had the opportunity to publish games in the past. but I hadn’t seen one that sparked my interest enough to do it.  I’ve heard lots of nice things from backers already (Cryptozoic, Stoneblade), and Magic Artist John Matson just posted a bit on his Facebook that made me so proud:

“I have never backed anything before on Kickstarter, but I just did tonight. For me, just his name alone being attached is enough to convince me it’s worthwhile “.

I can’t properly express how much all of this support has meant to me; these are affirmations that people appreciate the things I’ve done and have been involved in over the years.  Thank you all for your support so far, and I look forward to bringing you this excellent game.  It will make me the happiest man on the planet to know that people are loving this game and that it brings them the same joy and fun it has brought us!

Steve

We’ve just pushed the launch button over at Kickstarter for Foretold: Rise of a God!  So Exciting!

We’ve set up a page at BoardGameGeek.com as well and hope you’ll consider being a fan there in addition to backing our first game project!

Come along for the ride, it should be fun!

Steve

I thought you should see the amazing new products we just got in.

We also just got restocked on the Iconic line of products!

It’s come to my attention that “the big guy” is producing a version of a bacon (donut) sleeve. I just thought I’d take this moment to say, gee. I’m flattered.

And our Original Bacon sleeves are still available and among our best sellers after almost 5 years on the market.  Ask for them at your FLGS or order them right from our site! (follow the bacon. the bacon the bacooonnnnn)

Proudly,

Steve

This past fall my dear daughter Decided she wanted me to be a dolphin for Halloween.  My Loving wife polled facebook and got a bunch of people excited about me in a dolphin costume, and would have had one ordered for me if they were available. Alas, they were not. In the mean time, an enterprising friend made a photoshop hack of me in the dolphin costume and it sort of went nuts.  After all of the clamoring for these as a sleeve, I decided to go ahead with a small run and push them for charity.

I present to you.  the Steve-fin.

(Click the picture to be taken to the site to purchase stevefin)

These limited (very limited) edition sleeves are gloss finish and as awesome as the rest of our products… they are sized for magic only (sorry YuGiOh players!)  and are not being sold to stores or distributors for anytihng less than the price on my site.

I am donating every penny of sales (even production cost) to the non profit micro loan organization: World Vision. The money there will be loaned to individuals around the world to help them with their businesses. the payback rate is approximately 97% and the money is reloaned again and again.  This charity speaks directly to me as a small businessman.

Follow your dreams, indeed.

Steve

First order of business, Saturday night our host is doing a kernel update on our server. we will experience a bit of downtime anticipated to be 10-15 minutes.  In the unlikely event that something malfunctions, we’ll post updates to facebook.

NEXT up. new stuff. YEAH, NEW STUFF!

We’ve got a handful of new items finally hitting our warehouse in the next week.  they were expected several weeks ago but due to a few shipping push backs, we are running late.  The new estimated arrival to our warehouse for the first hunk is the 22nd or 23rd of January (for deckboxes) and the next bit should be just a couple days after that.

The items incoming have been added to the webstore and enabled to be purchased.  Any orders including the New Stuff ^(tm) will be held until those products are in hand before shipping.

New sleeves (all gloss finish except Keep Calm):

And new deckboxes