Re-introducing the Data Laughing Card

As most of you know, Decipher has made the Data Laughing card available through our Star Trek Customizable Card Game 2-Player Game. This move has brought comments from our consumers, both positive and negative. Daily we receive thanks from people who can now finally get the Data Laughing card, but we also have received complaints from some of you who previously went to great lengths to obtain the card.

Making this card available again was a tough decision. Since the distribution of the Strategy Guide (where this card was originally available) was so sparse, the sales of the book were much lower than we had anticipated. As a result, the redemption on Data Laughing was less than we could possibly have imagined. To further compound the problem, the book redemption offer expired at the end of 1996.

Being first and foremost a game company, we were left in a situation where the majority of our players were without access to all of the playing pieces. Since we ban no cards in our game, we were facing the real problem- an unfair advantage to the few players who had Data Laughing over the many thousands of players without it.

Decipher's print run of the Data Laughing card was limited to 500,000 cards. We have never reprinted this card, and will not do so. The print run was set to this level so that this card would not be perceived as an ultra-rare. Our expectation was that it would soon become widely available for trading.

After the redemption program came to an end we decided we had to distribute more of these cards in order to get a far larger number into the player community. Hence our decision to place these cards in our 2-Player games.

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