Who's up for a game of cards?
Over the years I've collected quite a few decks of creative, non-standard playing cards. Something about the artwork speaks to me. Each deck contains 55 little works of art (if you include the card back image), with utility no less.
At some point it occurred to me that the Eccentrics algorithm could generate some interesting playing card images. The next Radix Art release will test that theory!
Eccentrics Playing Cards
The upcoming "reward drop" as I've called it will be Eccentrics Playing Cards. There will be two separate card decks, one with a Light theme and one with a Dark theme. That's 110 generative art card images, each of which will be a separate NFT.
After the card NFTs are distributed we'll print and publish the cards as a physical two-deck boxed set that anyone can buy.
The card NFTs will be airdropped to members of the Radix Art Social Club and other collectors of my artwork who won the raffle that was run a few weeks ago.
New Ways to Qualify
If you aren't already on the list for the airdrop, there are still a couple ways to qualify:
- I've decided to offer some "Early Eccentrics" test mint images as NFTs on Foundation. They will be available starting Monday, Jan 17th. Anyone who purchases an Early Eccentrics image will also receive an Eccentrics Playing Card NFT during the airdrop.
- The first person to solve the Eccentrics 2 Puzzle will receive 2 Eccentrics Playing Card NFTs as their prize.
Early Eccentrics NFTs
You can learn about the Early Eccentrics images in this post and on this gallery page. I soul-searched about whether to offer these for sale. Some say that selling earlier versions of a collection can cheapen the collection's overall value. But many of these Eccentrics test images are iconic. They were all shown in advance of the first Eccentrics drop, either on Twitter or Discord, or during my After Dinner mints talk. So their existence is already known.
Many people expressed an interest in getting Eccentrics images like the Alien Holy Trinity, for example. I like the idea of letting collectors enjoy these little bits of gen art history, instead of leaving the images gathering dust on my hard drive.
The Puzzle
Did I forget to mention there was a puzzle built in to the Eccentrics 2 drop? I guess I did.
In any case, the first person to DM me in Discord with the solution before the Eccentrics Playing Card airdrop will qualify for 2 Playing Card NFTs!
If you have questions about the puzzle, feel free to ask them in the #radix channel in the ArtBlocks Discord server, or in the new Radix Art Discord.
The Airdrop
The tentative date for the airdrop is currently Wednesday, January 26th. Things can happen between now and then so the date might change. If it does I will let people know.
The drop will not be released on ArtBlocks this time, but using my own smart contract created in partnership with Manifold. These cards will be printed and the technical requirements for printed playing card images are very specific. In particular there's a need to load and use a font file, which is something that can't be done when all the code must be stored on the blockchain.
But the card images will still be 100% generated at mint time -- no image editing after the fact -- and then airdropped as NFTs to all the recipients.
Thanks for joining me in this experiment. Who's ready to play?