With Gen Con attendees trying out a learn-to-play event at Gen Con 2025, Justin Parnell, Equinox sales and marketing director, Americas, took time to answer some questions on topics including lessons learned in the first year of Altered, supply challenges and the upcoming Skybound Odyssey set releasing Oct. 3.

What are the ways that Equinox is working on building the community in the next year, especially in the U.S.?

One of the challenges that we as a small game always have is that in regions that are physically large, you can have a mass of players, and because the U.S. is so big, it becomes difficult to gather people in a central location. That’s why, obviously I love events like Gen Con, because people are going to come here. But we don’t always have Gen Con, that’s a once-a-year thing. We have a handful of conventions. So how can we get those people into more of an either centralized location or a game store that is willing and interested in running Altered and creating their own community?

We are trying to roll out an ambassador program where we are identifying people in the community that are interested in helping grow Altered at the LGS level, sending them to stores with some learn-to-play kits, some goodies to give away like promo boosters and such, and having them physically in the store. We’re trying to utilize our most passionate people in an official partnership with Equinox to say, we can help these tournament organizers and these retailers kickstart their community and try to incentivize them to do so at very minimal cost to them.

It’s quite early on this, it’s not something that’s been widely publicized. Before we get to Thanksgiving, I want to have an idea of how we can formalize this plan, then expand and unleash it in other areas that aren’t the U.S. We have some significant milestones coming up that are going to ultimately integrate with this.

Speaking of timelines, what are some upcoming milestones for Equinox?

We’re getting ready to hit our year two. It was this day one year ago, at Gen Con on Friday that I got my shipping notification for my personal Kickstarter. And I was feeling a little annoyed that I didn’t get it right before, but you know, you can’t have it all. I was excited about Altered as a fan and wanted to get my hands on cards.

Our first anniversary is going to be coming up with the release of Skybound Odyssey on Oct. 3, though prereleases are a week sooner, so Sept. 26 is really the date to put on your calendar for when you can start experiencing the set. We have a lot of really cool stuff happening in this set that we’ve started to reveal very slowly. Obviously, we have new heroes coming out, which is a massive deal for Altered. It marks the first time since Beyond the Gates that we have new heroes, and they’re great.

My favorite so far is Moyo and Silk, hands-down. I’ll give just a little tidbit of a spoiler. People read that card and say, “Why would I want to play a spell that costs 4? And definitely, why would I want to play a spell that costs 7? Why would I want to play anything so expensive?” Well, maybe there are things that are either incentivizing you to do so or make a way to cost differently than you would think.

After Beyond the Gates, we’ve had some smaller expansions. Now you’re going to see a larger expansion, not quite as large as Beyond the Gates but bigger than the other two, to see what Altered can really do once we’re outside of this base-level understanding of what the game is. This is going to be a big moment for us, that leads directly into our World Championship coming shortly after, within a month or so after Skybound Odyssey’s release.

For the World Championship, two years ago, we had lofty goals. There are these incredible things we want to do, and we’re going to do as many of these as we can. But after the World Championship, going into the second full year of Altered, we can try different things from an Organized Play standpoint, leading into what could be a second World Championship, or maybe some other big events along the way. We’re going to be able to try out some new initiatives that are outside the current game. You got a little bit of a taste of that in the first Tumults, with the Kuraokami event being able to impact a card.

In your first year, you’ve got a World Championship, regional events, etc. Were there really plans from the start to take a big swing right away?

We’re really blessed with a lot of team members who are extremely passionate and experienced in their particular area. Our narrative director, Yoshi, has the story mapped out to Set 27. I always call him a mad scientist, and I truly believe he is. He, along with our art department, has just developed this incredibly robust world. I finally had a chance to look at the art for Set 6, and I can confidently say that set has the best art for Altered, hands-down.

We definitely think big. Maybe to our detriment, maybe not. But we think big all the time. I think on my first week on the job, I pitched three of the things that have seen the light of day. And everyone in the company, I can say this without exaggeration, has these grand ideas that we want to institute. We’re basically putting them on a checklist to ask, “Can we do this? How can we make this a reality?”

A World Championship is a really great example, because I don’t think there’s an expectation for us to have something like that in the first year. But we all feel so passionately and believe that this game is incredible for competitive play. I’m someone who has a competitive background in TCGs, like several of our game designers and people in other parts of the company. We’re very much believers in saying, maybe Worlds this year isn’t going to be everything we dreamed of, and our dreams were much bigger. But you know what? We want to get it out so we can have the first one, to say, “This is what Altered can look like, and we want to build toward even better in the future.”

There have been issues with supply, not just here in the U.S. but elsewhere as well. What are the supply challenges Equinox is working against, and what are the solutions you’re looking at?

So we have our studio in Paris, we have all our production in Belgium. Ultimately, we’re dealing with almost a five-point process from Belgium to getting product to a player’s hands – whether that is actual product, whether it’s a Tumult Kit, a Print-on-Demand order – for better or for worse, it’s all coming from Europe. We maybe could’ve opted to print everything in China, where it could’ve been easier or more frequent, although given the current state of things, maybe it’s better that we didn’t.

We value making sure we have the highest quality product that we possibly can. Maybe that was a mistake, because it leaves us less capable in being agile to change things, but we want to be true to who we are, and that includes the products we’re making.

But then it comes to actual shipping logistics, and it’s sometimes the same thing, right? A lot of the times we are kind of outsourcing the logistics because we’re ultimately the designers and developers. We don’t have a factory. But Cartamundi does, and Cartamundi is working with UPS or DHL in Europe. And if there’s a delay, a one-day delay from us to them, and then a one-day delay from Cartamundi to UPS, then from UPS to distribution, and then from distribution to subdistribution, and the subdistribution to retailers, then you’re looking at things being delayed a week, and that becomes a problem. We’re just trying to get better at it, and unfortunately sometimes getting better at it means banging your head against the wall and making mistakes.

I think one of the things that we’re doing to a degree but could probably be doing better, is evaluating options for our partnerships at each of those levels and saying, “Here’s what we need. We need this to be able to happen at a certain time. Is that something you’re able to provide?” and if the answer is no, then we say, “OK, great. We’ll look at working with you when the answer could be yes.” But we need to kind of figure out what exactly that is. It’s something we talk about constantly, and it’s actually a large part of my job. I work with our distribution partners quite frequently. I would say I’ve got maybe a finger on the wheel, but I’m not the one driving. In a lot of cases, I’m the intermediary of communication going from production to shipping, logistics to distribution, and distribution to retailers. It’s probably one of the most challenging parts of my job, because oftentimes I feel like, as Equinox, it’s like, this is our product. How do we have less agency in this than we think? How can we get more agency?

The question is, maybe, is it more important for retailers to get the things that we said they would at the time we said they would, and obviously the answer to that is yes. But the question is also, do the players who are receiving these products want to be happy with what they’ve got? And the answer to that is yes, of course. So this, again, is a lesson learned where we can say, OK, our timeline for these things has to start even further ahead than we were expecting.

What are you trying to focus on in terms of messaging as a company, to the community?

Broadly, we talk about that constantly. Part of what we’ve all discovered over this journey is discovering the way that different regions or languages or countries are primarily getting information. You have some people who will go to our website to look for information. You have some who only go to social media. You have some who only go to Discord. And it’s one of the hardest lessons that I feel we’re still learning to a degree, is that the answer to this is all of them. If we put out information on Discord, that’s not going to make it to a large segment of the population, and that has to be recommunicated by someone like you that’s doing that job. But then you have people who don’t go to the website either, so how do you solve this? The answer is that we have to be extra robust in making sure that we are communicating critical pieces of information.

We have to make sure that all these bits of communication are shared through every different channel and reaching every person. That means if you’re someone who’s highly invested in Altered, you might see information on our website, on Discord, on social media, in a newsletter, in an email in your inbox. We just need to get better at understanding where and when and how frequently information is getting communicated.

What are the lessons that your team have learned in this first full year of Altered?

One of the big ones is that we did a pretty good job to engage players to feel like, if they attend events at their local store, that they’re getting rewarded for it. But I think we didn’t do a good enough job at encouraging retailers to host these events. My thinking initially was, if your players are going to be rewarded, they’re going to want to come to your store. But what makes you as the retailer want to even run events in the first place? The players. You have to have the players and the sales to back it up, right? So one of my goals going forward is, how can we do a better job of engaging the retailers to get them to engage the players? How can we say, “Hey, you’re going to be benefited for registering your event and having that posted and then having people play in your store and having them get rewards”? That’s a question we’re exploring. I’ll say it’s a top-of-mind question, and at a year in, it’s something we feel is very important, and we know the clock is ticking on that.

One of the other lessons we’ve learned and that we’re solving is that the Trial by Frost prerelease went extremely well. We actually had fewer individual stores running prereleases than we were expecting. However, we had a greater number of players, which meant that players were willing to travel to prereleases. From Trial by Frost to Whispers, we put a lot of effort into making sure stores knew that players would travel, because it was true, we had the data. So we get to Whispers, we get more stores, but fewer players than at Trial by Frost. So fewer people engaged in the prerelease. So we solved one part but then people were more engaged on this part.

It’s a calibration of, we did enough to engage players for set two, but not enough to engage stores. The next time, we did a good job of engaging stores, but not players. In this pendulum, how can we land in the middle? It’s something we need to figure out, how to engage both sides. The retailers who are ultimately running the events have to be excited about the product, but not just excited, they have to be benefited enough from the product by a community or financial standpoint, to be able to do it. Players have to feel like their time and money are being valued with the things they’re getting and the experience they’re getting.

One of the big areas of improvement is the retailer, the shop account functionality, and that’s something that our digital team is working on. And much like everything else we do as a company, we’re not really willing to release something if we feel like it’s not to the level we want. We don’t want to release it half-baked. That’s caused things to take longer. Like for the Print-on-Demand and the Marketplace, we spent a lot of time making sure that it was right and works, and it does.

What about parts of the world where services still aren’t available?

If you look at a place and say they don’t really have access to those services, I would say confidently that we are actively engaged in talks to make sure that we can get those there. It really comes back to my first point of how our distribution model is. For set 2, I was working on getting Tumults into Mexico, into South Africa, into Colombia, and we hope for set 3 Tumults that we’re going to be able to do the same thing. That includes distribution and getting Altered product there and not having them be behind.

We’re working on several countries in Asia. You know, they have a World Championship Qualifier. So we’re actively trying to get Altered into these regions, because there is a demand. It purely is logistics in trying to make sure we can get distribution. Because it’s not just shipping a big pallet of Altered over there. I was talking about the seven-point chain from us to the consumer, and sometimes it’s an eight- or nine-point chain for these other regions. But as long as we can make that work and we don’t have to make the product more expensive, because that’s not something we’re willing to do. Just know that, if you’re in a country that has any sort of active TCG scene, we are trying to get Altered there.

OK, let’s do a few fun questions. Skybound Odyssey, what can we say about it?

I think Trial by Frost and Whispers from the Maze are really great sets in their own unique ways. But I feel that Skybound Odyssey is really the set, from a design perspective, where we hit our stride. I can talk about one mechanic because we revealed it partially, the ascend mechanic. We introduced in Trial by Frost the concept of caring about the area that your characters are in. Ascend takes that to an entirely new level. It kind of changes the attributes of an Adventure card, right? There’s more of that coming.

As we go along with reveals for Skybound Odyssey and going forward, you’re going to see – and this is what I mean by hitting our stride from a development side – we’re a TCG, but we have so much of this board game infusion. We’re looking at how we can create interactions in Altered that feel like you’re interacting with a board game rather than a TCG.

Who’s your favorite new character?

I’m not going going to spoil anything, but I’ll give you something that’s even juicier. One of my favorite cards in Skybound Odyssey is not a character, or a hero, or a permanent. It’s a spell. It’s a character that we’ve seen in the past that is doing something very cool on a spell. I would say it’s a quite special effect, and people will, when they see the card, they’ll figure out what I’m talking about.

But I’m going to go back and give an answer that won’t make any sense. My favorite character in Skybound Odyssey is the character who works best with Moyo. You’ll know it when you see it.

What can we expect from the World Championship?

First, I’ll just say: Soon, more information about the World Championships is coming. I think you’re going to see decks that you haven’t seen before because there haven’t been as many opportunities to play in large events. There are some decks that people have shared with me because, you know, I’m not a competitor, that I think are going to be very exciting. Like I said, I come from a competitive background, so my most exciting thing next year is to be there and watch the top tables and the whole weekend to see what people are cooking.