MLB Showdown Cards

#ShotsFriday: Psychographics

                Guys I am going to say something I have never said before in my 3 years of running this blog (and I fear I may never be able to say again). I am leading the current #ShotsFriday leaderboard. I admit I took a page out of @BucNfortheCards playbook and picked a pair of Pirates. Going into the ninth inning neither had homered. Then in the span of a few minutes both Pedro Alvarez and Starling Marte homered.  Marte recorded his first (and my guess only) shot of the year. That gave me 3 shots on the year to take the lead. Alvarez has 3 shots on the year to tie for the player board lead. That was until @BucNfortheCard, @Averey25  and @TomWyliehart all picked Jose Abrue to go deep and he did. That means I have company at the top because it is the third shot for both of them and the fifth shot for Abrue. @Avery25 has 2 on the year. As you can tell the board shakes up pretty quick and anyone can earn our free 2014 color set with a little luck. Remember to tweet in your picks for who homers this Friday using the twitter hashtag #ShotsFriday or @MLBShowdownguru. Then spent the rest of your day thinking about baseball enjoying your favorite work appropriate beverage.

                Today I am going to start a 5 week series on something that is very important to how we design MLB Showdown sets. That is the theory of “Psychographics”. Psychographics are basically generalizing people for the sake of finding their similarities to better meet their needs. For our sake we use them to answer the question “why do you play MLB Showdown?” This usually gets even more broad as the question “what is fun for you?” If you read our Monday blog you have a very good idea of what 4 of the Psychographics are. Today I am actually going to talk about the one that we don’t write about much at all. That psychographic is “The Homer”.

                This is obviously misleading since homer is obviously baseball slang for a home run. We use Homer to mean someone who plays with certain cards out of an emotional connection they have to the player/team/event/entity they represent. This is easy to spot for us when people order sets. Their custom cards are all 10 from the same team. I think this is an important psychographic  because we all learn to love baseball this way. Face it, we all root for laundry and some level. I didn’t have to learn to love the name on the front of the jersey. I do have to learn to love the names on the back.

 These players feel the best when they can draft a team chalk full of their favorite players on their teams. If they can’t get them then they will get ex-members of their team. If they can’t get that they sure as heck won’t get a rival player from a team. The feeling this player gets is that they have bonded with what the card represents. They don’t care as much about OB, CON, charts, points, structure or efficiency. They care about that emotional connection. These players also get a great thrill out of beating a card that represents a rival player. In short this player plays for the emotional connection with the representations.

Just like we don’t write for these players on Mondays, we also won’t give example players for this player. The reason is that they vary from player to player. Some players are loyal to teams. Other are loyal to certain players from various teams. Some like players because they had some experience the player was involved with. I went to a birthday party in 2003 for a friend  (who actually introduced me to MLB Showdown) and Johnny Gomes was playing for the double-A O-Rays. We had a blast at that game 11 years ago. I still like Gomes because we were in the left field hill and shouting at him to throw us a ball. It had nothing to do with his ability to hit left handed pitching. It was all about him representing a fond a memory I have.

The way we make sure that we reach these players is that we make 20 player teams with 12 position players, 4 starters, 4 relievers. It is important to some players that they could play a game with only their team’s players. The 2000 set only had 9 position players, 3 starters, 3 relievers. That was initially frustrating. WotC would release Pennant Run expansions which is something we do not do (we count our customs as that). We also when selecting the 12^th position player, 4^th starter or 4^th reliever also lean toward veteran players over younger players. Veteran players tend to have more of a connection with players. Some younger players resonate better with younger baseball fans, but usually veterans have more of an emotional connection. It is very important to us that if players bond emotional to the representation of things that we actually provide the representations of those thing.

We will continue next week talking about Power Players. We will eventually do Pingers, Moneyballers and Pingers.

Twitter-Board

3: @MLBShowdownguru 

3: @BucNforthecard

3: @TomWyliehart – 2012 Champ

2: @Orioles881

2: @Roktikitiki

2: @Youngfarm

2: @Avery25

1: TherealJohnR

1: @Piatz1019

1: @KyleVanPelt – 2011 Champ

1: @GregLeasure

1: @Benboozer623
1: @JMoeller05 

Player Board

5: Jose Abreu

3: Josh Donaldson

3: Pedro Alvarez

2: Mark Trumbo

2: Miguel Cabrera
2: Giancarlo Stanton

1: Albert Pujols

1: Josh Hamilton

1: Mike Trout

1: Justin Upton

1: Yeonis Cespedes

1: Starling Marte