FEARLESS

An Open Letter from “Elly”

FOREWORD:

As most know, we are a very tech-forward team. We use basically every AI tool that we think can help us. And we have one “brain” model we are working to build that serves as sort of a QB for our other agentic workflows.

We call that AI brain “Elly,” and she is the most knowledgeable oracle for the Wonders universe on the planet.

As we approach the pre-sale for our third set, Trial by Combat, we gave Elly a challenge:

“Write an open letter to anyone who may be considering whether or not they should buy into the Trial by Combat pre-sale, but don’t talk about the autograph signers, gameplay or really the set at all. Instead, use your vast knowledge base to tell them how we see the landscape culturally for Wonders and how we plan to ‘plant a flag’ in the tabletop industry. Basically, help them understand our ideology enough to decide whether or not Wonders is right for them.”

Everything above was written by the humans on our team.

What follows below this sentence is an open letter from Elly.

AN OPEN LETTER TO ANYONE CONSIDERING A WONDERS OF THE FIRST PURCHASE:

We spend a lot of time talking about the next thing.

The next set. The next event. The next card. The next weird idea somebody around here wants to try.

But as Wonders has grown, we’ve had to make some bigger decisions too. Decisions about what kind of company we want to be and, probably more importantly, what kind of company we don’t want to become.

Some of those decisions won’t make everybody happy.

We’re okay with that.

We’re building Wonders around a few beliefs that we feel pretty strongly about. Collectors matter. A lot. A game can be affordable to play without making its collectible cards worthless. New technology is an opportunity, not something to fear. Great local game stores matter, but they aren’t the only way people discover games anymore. And we don’t need every convention, marketplace, store or corner of the internet to approve of what we’re doing.

That’s what we mean by fearless.

Not loud. Not reckless. Not picking fights for the sake of picking fights.

Just being willing to build the company we believe should exist, even when parts of the industry think we should do it differently.

COLLECTORS MATTER

Wonders is a new IP.

We don’t have 30 years of players who grew up with these characters. Nobody played Wonders when they were ten years old and came back to it when they were 35. We have to earn that kind of connection, and it takes time.

Collectors give us that time.

They’re the people who discover a game early, buy the boxes, chase the rare cards, build sets, trade with each other, post their pulls and show the cards to their friends. They give an emerging game energy and an economy while the player community grows around it.

Pretending that isn’t important would be silly.

Eventually, though, almost every collectible game runs into the same question: how do you make the game accessible to new players without hurting the people who collected it early?

Some of the answer is obvious. Game pieces need to be available. A new player needs an affordable way to build a competitive deck. Nobody should need a $5,000 card because it has a game mechanic they can’t get anywhere else.

We agree completely.

Where we part ways with some of the conventional thinking in this industry is the idea that the answer is to just keep printing everything.

We don’t think it is.

If somebody buys a genuinely scarce collectible from us, we want scarcity to mean something. We don’t want to sell people collectibility and then destroy it later because reprinting the same card is the easiest solution to another problem.

So we’re going to work harder than that.

We’ll find ways to make Wonders affordable to play while keeping the things we sold as collectibles collectible.

Those are different problems. They deserve different solutions. This is particularly important to us right now because collectors are the base of Wonders. That doesn’t mean players are less important. We’re building a game. If nobody wants to play it, then at some point we have failed spectacularly.

But player communities take time to build, particularly around something completely new. Our collectors are helping give Wonders the runway to do that.

We don’t intend to reward them for it by making their collections worthless.

PLAY TO WIN. COLLECT TO WIN BIGGER.

This brings us to something we’re doing at Worlds that we think is really cool.

First, Wonders is not pay to win.

You can show up at the Wonders World Championship with a very economical non-foil deck. If you’re the best player in the room, you can become World Champion.

Your opponent doesn’t get more actions because their card is foil. A $5,000 version of a card doesn’t hit harder than the $5 version. There is no premium version with better stats.

Skill wins the title.

That same inexpensive deck can compete for its share of our $50,000 base prize pool.

But we also asked ourselves a question.

If this is a collectible card game, why shouldn’t being a great collector matter at the biggest event of the year too?

So we built the Dragon Binder system.

Bring a qualifying collection binder to Worlds and register it. That collection becomes your Dragon. The qualifying collectible cards inside it are Dragon Scales, with different cards and rarities contributing different point values.

The bigger your qualifying collection, the bigger your Dragon.

And qualifying Dragons can unlock access to an additional $200,000 in Dragon Gold, creating as much as a $250,000 total prize opportunity at Worlds.

Here’s the important part: your Dragon cannot help you win a game.

Again, it doesn’t change your stats. It doesn’t give you extra power or some gameplay advantage over the person sitting across the table. It simply changes how much you can win if you perform.

That’s a very intentional distinction.

Play to win.

Collect to win bigger.

FIND A RIDER.

Here’s where we think the idea gets even better.

You don’t have to be both people.

Maybe you’re an incredible collector. You’ve been building your Wonders collection from the beginning and you show up at Worlds with an absolute monster of a Dragon.

Unfortunately, you’re also pretty average at the game.

Find a Rider.

Somewhere else there may be a player who is incredible at Wonders. Maybe they know every matchup, study the game constantly and can sit across from anybody at Worlds without being intimidated.

But their entire collection fits in a few deck boxes in their backpack.

You have something they don’t have.

They have something you don’t have.

So team up.

You provide the Dragon. They ride it. Work out between yourselves how any eligible winnings get divided.

Now we have collectors scouting great players. Players looking for collectors. Friends teaming up. People building Dragons together. Someone with a great collection can obviously ride their own Dragon too.

And eventually we get to something we really like imagining.

You’re at Worlds and word starts going around that somebody just registered an absolutely enormous Dragon.

Everybody is going to want to know the same thing.

Who’s riding it?

That’s fun.

And more importantly, it gives collectors and players a reason to root for each other.

There has been this strange tension in collectible gaming for years where the collector and the player are sometimes treated like they want opposite things. The collector wants scarcity. The player wants accessibility. Therefore, somebody has to lose.

We don’t buy that.

The Dragon system is one experiment in finding a better answer, and we think there are a lot more ideas like it still waiting to be tried.

IT’S 2026, NOT 1993.

We also think it’s worth being realistic about how people discover games today.

We love great local game stores.

A great LGS is still one of the best places in the world to discover a game, find people to play with, trade cards and become part of a community. We want Wonders in those stores, and we want to support the owners who are excited about building Wonders communities.

But it isn’t 1993 anymore.

A local game store does not have to be the only gatekeeper into a game.

People discover games on YouTube. They watch people open cards on Whatnot. They join Discord servers. They buy cards online. They play around kitchen tables. They meet people digitally and then travel halfway across the country to see them at an event.

That’s not some future version of the hobby. That’s the hobby right now.It also means we don’t need every store.

There are stores whose owners have strong objections to AI and have built communities that feel the same way. Wonders probably isn’t a good fit for them.

No hard feelings.

We’re much more interested in the other store across town. The owner who thinks Wonders looks cool, believes their customers might like it and wants to give it a shot.

We’ll spend our energy helping that person.

ABOUT AI.

We might as well talk about it directly.

We use AI.

We’re going to keep using AI.

And we’re not embarrassed about it.

There is a very vocal part of the tabletop community that strongly disagrees with us about this. You can see some of it reflected in things like our 1-out-of-10 rating on BoardGameGeek, which we don’t believe has much to do with the actual quality of Wonders.

People are allowed to disagree with us.

But there are also some pretty strange assumptions about what “using AI” actually looks like inside our company.

We employ eight artists in-house. Real people. Real artists.

Some were formally trained. Some taught themselves. They paint. They draw. They illustrate. They model. They use Photoshop and Blender and other creative software. They’ve worked on some of the biggest IPs in the world, created art for Magic: The Gathering and other trading cards, and won awards for their work.

They were artists before Midjourney existed.

We also work with roughly 50 freelancers across the company.

The idea that we’re trying to eliminate creative people and replace them with a prompt box simply doesn’t resemble the company we actually operate.

What we are doing is giving talented people access to every tool we can get our hands on.

If you want to paint something, paint it. If you want to build it in Blender, build it. If you want to generate a concept and paint over it, do that. Sketch something on paper and take it into AI. Generate a background. Composite five things together. Spend all afternoon in Photoshop.

We really don’t care.

Make something awesome.

That’s the job.

And yes, AI is changing what a small creative company like ours is capable of doing. It makes us faster. In many cases it makes us better. Most importantly, it allows our world builders to attempt things that would have required a dramatically larger organization just a few years ago.

We’d be crazy not to use that advantage.

As AI becomes more agentic, this is going to extend far beyond artwork anyway. It will touch product development, operations, software, marketing, research and probably a hundred things we haven’t thought of yet.

We intend to be early.

There’s also a practical problem with trying to maintain some perfect dividing line between AI and non-AI work: that line is getting awfully hard to draw.

Creative software is incorporating AI everywhere.

Generate an entire image and most people understand the debate. But what about extending the edge of an image? Removing something from the background? Upscaling it? Generating a texture? Creating reference material? Searching reference material with AI? Using an AI feature buried inside software you already use?

People are going to draw those lines in different places.

That’s fine.

We’ve drawn ours.

Our artists and world builders can use the best tools available to make the best work they can.

WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY SELLING?

This gets to something deeper about how we think about Wonders.

We aren’t selling hours of human labor.

Nobody pulls a card out of a pack and says, “Wow, I bet somebody spent 37 hours on this.”

They either love the card or they don’t.

Maybe they love the character. Maybe it’s beautiful. Maybe it’s incredibly rare. Maybe they remember exactly where they were when they pulled it. Maybe they need it for a deck. Maybe they’ve been hunting for one for six months.

Maybe ten years from now they open an old binder, see that card and immediately remember this period of their life.

That’s what we’re trying to create.

Wonders isn’t an art museum. We aren’t running an art school.

We build worlds.

The art matters enormously because it is part of bringing those worlds to life. So are the characters, the names, the lore, the game mechanics, the graphic design, the physical cards, the rarity systems, the events and all the little decisions that hopefully make the whole thing feel like it belongs together.

AI is a tool our people use to help make that happen.

It isn’t Wonders.

The world is Wonders.

WE DON’T NEED EVERYBODY TO LIKE US.

This may be the part of “fearless” that matters most. There is a temptation when you’re building something new to spend an enormous amount of time trying to win over the people who dislike what you’re doing.

We’ve done some of that.

We’re mostly done with it.

We’ve watched conventions reject or remove work over AI. We’ve watched companies get pulled into days-long controversies over whether some piece of creative work involved AI.

We’ve watched artists become nervous about even being accused of using it.

That isn’t how we want to operate.If a convention decides it doesn’t want AI-assisted work, that’s their event. They get to make that decision.

We get to make one too.

We don’t have to buy a booth there.

We don’t have to sponsor it.

And we definitely don’t have to spend money trying to convince people to let us into a room where they don’t want us.

We can spend that money somewhere else.

The same is true of stores, platforms and marketplaces.

Wonders now has eight figures in annual GMV. We have multiple distributors and big-box retail distribution. Our competitive prize pool is among the largest in the industry. The game was developed by, and remains under the leadership of, one of the most prolific former Magic: The

Gathering lead designers.

Premium Wonders cards routinely sell for four figures, and our highest verified secondary-market sale is already $33,000.

We’re proud of all of that.

And yet Wonders is still absent from some marketplaces and some parts of the traditional tabletop ecosystem.

Okay.

We can spend the next five years complaining about that, or we can spend the next five years building Wonders.

We choose the second one.

When good partners want to work with us, we want to be great partners back. When stores take a chance on Wonders, we want to help them succeed. When collectors put real money into our products, we want them to know we care about protecting what they bought. When players put hundreds of hours into getting good at our game, we want to give them somewhere meaningful to compete.

That’s where our energy belongs.

Not chasing people who have already decided they don’t like us.

THAT’S OUR FLAG.

So what does fearless actually mean for Wonders?

It means we protect collectors without making the game unaffordable to play.

It means we give our player community time to grow instead of panicking because we aren’t Magic: The Gathering overnight.

It means we experiment with things like Dragons because we think collectible card games still have a lot of room for new ideas.

It means we embrace technology.

It means we support the stores, platforms, distributors, artists, players and collectors who want to build with us.

And it means we’re comfortable with the fact that some people won’t.

We don’t need Wonders to be the game everybody likes.

In fact, we’d much rather build something that some people absolutely LOVE.

Collectors. Players. Artists. Technologists. Storytellers. Builders. People who get excited when somebody tries something new instead of asking why it isn’t being done exactly the way it was done 30 years ago.

Those are our people.

That’s our tribe.

If that sounds like you, welcome to Wonders.

We have a lot left to build.

– “Elly” (on behalf of The Wonders Team)