Bad Penny Press recently passed one whole year of issues, with the first test issue publishing on January 24, 2023, and the first “real” distributed issue (Issue #3) publishing on February 6, 2023. To celebrate, we have a collection of stories to share with our readers, about the people who put Bad Penny Press together and how the newsletter came to be. We hope you enjoy!
Meet the Press
Here’s who’s behind producing each issue!
blinkingline got hooked on KeyForge in 2018 playing proxies of GenCon KeyForge decks. A former staple in the Bay Area KeyForge scene, he helped found the Ancient Bear Republic as well as Archon Arcana. He has served as a judge at the US National Championship, multiple Vault Tour stops, and KeyForge Celebration. He also answers the weekly “Ask a Judge” question for Bad Penny Press.
xoque was introduced to KeyForge in early 2019 by a friend and has been obsessed ever since. During the pandemic and to give back to the community, he started the Data Forge stream to share the fun of KeyForge. For Bad Penny Press, he reports on online leagues and on content features to share.
Dead-Sync discovered KeyForge in 2021 as a result of pandemic-driven internet searching for new games to play at home. From then, he worked to help build his local KeyForge scene in Connecticut (home state of the pizza capital of the world: New Haven), first by introducing friends to the game, and later partnering with a new LGS that opened in 2023 where he serves as EO and judge for KeyForge events. For the Press, he collaborated with the team to design BPP’s visual identity and graphics, and also helps write news and feature stories.
Why the Bad Penny was Pressed
Why create the Bad Penny Press newsletter? How did it all begin? Here’s a short story behind the inspiration of the project:
It’s late 2022, and there is a lot to stay up on with KeyForge. The game’s impending relaunch at the heart of it all of course, but not to be dismissed was the content being produced by creators to help maintain interest in the game, and online play leagues which allowed organized play to continue despite the absence of new product or official OP events.
“At some point, I wished there was an easy way to get weekly news about the game” says blinkingline, “I felt like it would be great if there was something that just put all that stuff into one place and it just magically showed up to me once a week. So if I had a busy week in my personal life or went on vacation or whatever, I could read a single email and in five minutes or so be like: ‘OK, I feel pretty much caught up with what is going on in the Crucible now.’”
Over time, this is something Ancient Bear Republic teammates blinkingline and xoque would discuss over the course of a season. “One of the things I saw was so many great online leagues being played and nowhere to find out about them.” says xoque, “One of the opportunities we saw was to give a space for leagues to advertise themselves to an audience outside of the close knit Discord community.”
Given xoque’s livestream productions with Data Forge, blinkingline’s involvement with founding Archon Arcana, and both of their involvements in ABR, they knew there was value in a community-made weekly newsletter for KeyForge.
Not long after, Dead-Sync — who co-moderates the KeyForge subreddit with blinkingline — was connecting with xoque regarding the subreddit’s Key Creators program. “xoque saw the common goal of community outreach between both a weekly newsletter and the Key Creators program I was working on for the subreddit.” says Sync, discussing how he was introduced to the project. “I thought it was an awesome idea and the absolute right time to create something like it ahead of Winds of Exchange’s release”.
The three connected to forge a plan: A joint project between Archon Arcana, Data Forge, and the KeyForge subreddit: to create a weekly KeyForge newsletter created by and for the KeyForge community.
Did it work? Well, we like to think so! Here are some factoids from our first year:
Bad Penny Press is read across 36 US states and 36 countries.
Issue #3 was sent to 28 people.
Issue #54 was sent to 337 people.
Issue #51 (featuring the 2024 Alliance Restricted List and Tournament Rules and Guidelines update) is our most opened standard issue.
Our exclusive Grim Reminders Card Previews special issue was opened over 1,000 times!
6 out of 7 Hastatus Raptors agree: they love BPP! (That last one is a jerk anyway)
— Insert Title Here —
If you don’t have a catch title and a flashy logo, are you even a real publication? We’re probably misinformed, but we thought so! BPP’s graphic designer Dead-Sync takes us on the journey of how we got to the penny:
After our initial conversations, our first step was to brainstorm names in a shared document. We came up with a comprehensive list of 25 name ideas, and like any legitimate creative production, what we landed on was none of those.
We explored some “on the nose” names, to make sure people could make no mistake this was a KeyForge newsletter (KeyForge Weekly, The Key, This Week in KeyForge), as well as some more niche options that harkened: “if you know, you know” (Hub City Weekly, Sound the Horns, Forge Compiler), rounding out the ideas with some that were just fun (The Buzz-le, Mind Bulletin, Control the Week, The Howling Hole).
At some point xoque brought up Bad Penny and “Bad Penny Press”. I think the moment that was uttered there was a sense of instant unanimous agreement: we had found our name. It had a great ring to it, Bad Penny is an iconic card — which like our newsletter — keeps coming back to you, a natural step towards BPP’s tagline: “Into your hand each week!”
By adding the subtitle “A KeyForge Newsletter”, we think we combined the best of both worlds by choosing a name KeyForge players connect with, while also remaining accessible to new players who are trying to find sources of information for KeyForge.
Even though we ultimately didn’t lean quite so heavily into option 1’s literal newspaper aesthetic (we are digital, after all), the ‘hint of print’ is felt throughout the wordmark’s design. A weighty serif font is evocative of large metal sorts in a printing press frame. A slightly faded black makes it feel less like pure digital black and more like ink, and the background color is reminiscent of a faded paper, matching the bronze color tones of the logo.
The stamp on it all, is the iconic Bad Penny Press logo, based off the iconic card art drawn by talented illustrator Nasrul Hakim:
We hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes!
Feedback
As we reflect back on the last year, we want to use this as an opportunity to reach out to you, the readers who get BPP delivered to their inbox each week.
What do you like? What could we do better? Is anything missing? Feel free to leave a comment below or contact us in the Archon Arcana discord in the Bad Penny Press #feedback channel. We’d love to hear from you!