Artificial product, artificial hype: the saga of Wonders of the First’s AI art and NFT-powered CCG

Web3 is a technological philosophy dead on arrival, heralding decentralization and transparency but double dipping into financial scams and impenetrable bleeding edge coding structures. But this doesn’t stop people from attempting to twist blockchain developments, NFTs, and AI into any number of solutions in search of a problem. 

Tabletop and card hobby spaces have not been insulated from Web3 stunts, but many of the most ardent players and collectors are skeptical by nature. Why else would they invest in grading services if they weren’t acutely aware of the ways in which a seemingly legitimate deal could fall through at the drop of a half-letter grade or an indication of forgery? So, when Wonders of the First—a totally new collectible card game—raised nearly 1.25 million dollars on Kickstarter in just a week, brimming with AI Art and promising intellectual property rights to the cards, the community was less than thrilled. 

First, the Kickstarter was canceled. Then, it went back up. Now, a month after it first went wide, questions still dog this project. 

Truthfully, much of Wonders of the First doesn’t make sense until you reexamine it as a collectible card game (CCG) framework hastily draped over a Web3-focused investment enterprise. In an attempt to provide a shelter for eager collectors, the company has lifted several moves directly from the NFT and blockchain playbooks: constant hype, promises that players would directly own parts of the game, isolating those who have bought in via Discord (alongside an open invitation to “see for yourself”), and a blanket denial of criticism. Nothing the project advertised was in any way illegal, but those who knew what to look for could spot the signs of a financialization strategy at the expense of players.

A tale of two Kickstarters

On April 30, Jeff French and his collaborators launched a Kickstarter campaign to support the production, development, and distribution of a new CCG called Wonders of the First. 

Wonders of the First is a CCG with a business strategy that aims to balance both gameplay and collectibility. French recruited veteran Magic: The Gathering designer Brian Tinsman to craft Wonders of the First’s design, wherein two players use a 50-card deck to battle for control of seven crystals across several lanes. From an outsider perspective, whether or not the game is playable isn’t that interesting. (It’s relatively easy to make a playable game, if not a good one.) But the way that Wonders of the First’s limited run, no-reprint, NFT-based model deliberately positions itself as a bastion against greedy companies who are willfully degrading your collection through reprints and reneged reserved list assurances—French all but names modern Magic: The Gathering as the target of his personal animosity—is distinctive. 

Within thirty seconds of going live, Wonders of the First was a fully-funded project, netting over $25,000. By the end of the day they were closing in on $1 million in pledges. Almost entirely produced with AI art, promising no reprints, and with purse strings attached to a company based on peddling NFTs, many in the gaming world took notice of Wonders and quickly made their derision known. 

 A week later, on May 7, Kickstarter alerted French that he was in violation of their terms of service and that he had two days to take down the campaign voluntarily before it was removed. On May 9, the initial Wonders of the First project was shut down, and a small note on the front page said that the campaign “had been canceled by the creator.” Within a few hours, the URL that previously led to the campaign produced a 404 notice. By May 10, the URL redirected to the Kickstarter homepage. 

From May 7 to 10 on the Wonders of the First’s Discord server, and in subsequent “town halls” Rascal attended, French maintained that he would not remove the campaign himself, even after Kickstarter told him to take it down. This became a point of pride for the team—they were standing up to both Kickstarter and the perceived vocal mob who had made their dislike of Wonders publicly known. Further, French told the discord to “Study Occam’s Razor”—a philosophical theory that posits that the simplest explanation is the most likely. He then went on to imply that Kickstarter canceled his campaign not because of a violation of terms of service, but because people were loud about his project online. A spokesperson for Kickstarter specifically denied French’s assumptions. 

On Tuesday, May 14, the Wonders of the First campaign was live again, this time with a shorter campaign timeframe, intending to close on May 30. 

From May 14 through May 30, Wonders was live on Kickstarter. This time with no NFTs. They ended their campaign with about $200,000 less than the original week-long canceled campaign, and roughly 200 fewer backers. The canceled Kickstarter was also on the site, this time under a different url. Three days before the end of the campaign, on May 27, French attested that he had been “banned” from posting on Kickstarter after calling out a criticism of the campaign in the comment section. (Kickstarter stated that they do not comment on specific actions taken against individual accounts, but iterate that French “was not banned.”) Regardless, the new Wonders campaign ended on May 30 as expected, earning a whopping $1.2 million. 

But the campaign did not go smoothly. From French’s own self-described banning to accusations of “trolling” and even suspicions of self-funding, Wonders limped over its previously established finish line; a successful Kickstarter behind them, but also a bitter taste in the mouths of many. 

Rascal attempted to reach out to Wonders of the First four times over the past month to discuss the project, and was turned down or ignored each time. As part of this outreach, Rascal emailed the media contact for Wonders of the First a series of questions, which also went unanswered. 

With 2,106 backers for a collectible card game that promises local store delivery before the end of year, chances of it gaining enough momentum to carve any money away from Magic: The Gathering (Wonders’ often-cited goal) are slim. But so much of what Wonders of the First actually promises comes from the man at the head of this whole endeavor. Who the hell is Jeff French?

Jeff French’s quest for digital collectible relevancy

Jeff French’s corporate quest for his digital-meets-physical collectible card game began in May 2021 when he founded Blokpax, a Web3 company with the goal of bridging the gap between physical trading card collectibles and digital collectibles. Of course, in 2021, this meant NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens. The company is still around, but, like many NFT-based companies, public investment isn’t readily apparent beyond the occasional transaction. In total though, the official Blokpax account has created 184,900 NFTs since 2021, according to OpenSea.

If you’re curious about how Blokpax, or even Wonders of the First, can stick around as businesses or boast their team of nearly thirty people, it’s largely because French employs staff from his other professional endeavors, cross-pollinating their labor along multiple projects. He founded AdDrive in 2000 (a lead-generation company with the early aughts tagline “Road Trip to Moneyville”) which was later doing business as SubscriberBASE (itself sued by the FTC in 2013 for helping promote a free gift card text message spam/scam). French also founded LoudDoor (a data analytics company) in 2008,  Storylift (content marketing) in 2015, and Blokpax in 2021—more on Blokpax later. According to their personal LinkedIn profiles, multiple employees work for two or three or even all four companies: LoudDoor, Storylift, Blokpax, and Wonders of the First, and many used to work at AdDrive. 

French has been in the NFT for nearly five years, and within that time, he has likely attempted every single conceivable gimmick possible to convince people to buy his digital products—to moderate success. Blokpax created, or was associated with, at least six different NFT collections; Fraxionals (the earliest project Rascal could find, where collectors can own percentages of a real card via NFTs), Blokpax Vault, collison.art, Infinite Moments, BPX Drip, Crowdslabs, Card Geeks, CryptoPunks Trading Cards (not Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks, which is widely considered the first contemporary NFT collection), Bantam Brigade, and Lost Miners of the Ether. Blokpax established trading programs within Web3 so that NFT investors could “win” physical sports cards through continued digital purchases, kind of like a punch card at your local coffee shop. It also established Home Team Heroes—a collectible card game featuring sports stars drawn in a comic book style that are also attached to NFTs. 

[NFTs are] an investment bubble that will always burst when people realize that they’re just selling to each other, and the currency of the day is collective hype. 

It’s also worth noting that Wonders isn’t the first NFT-TCG French has attempted to establish. Bantam Brigade is another card game full of AI art produced by Blokpax, and targets a younger demographic in its marketing. Bantam Brigade failed to garner any kind of collectibility, and the pivot to Wonders appears to be rooted in making sure that there is enough of a gamer base to support the collectors. Or, at the very least, the appearance of a gamer base. 

Now, instead of relying on companies like Topps or Upper Deck to produce the physical products that drive up virtually attached digital collectibility, French and his team have decided to cut out the middleman. This time, they’re going to print the cardboard themselves.

Cracks in the Non Fungible foundation

By promising limited runs of cards and a no reprint policy, Wonders of the First assured backers it would produce a collectible card game that, first and foremost, respected the desires of hardcore collectors over player’s desire to own a complete set of every card. In one YouTube video, French he asserts that his collection “deteriorates” when reprints occur in order to meet the demands of players and gameplay. He views his collections as investments, and when Wizards of the Coast moves cards off the reserve list that Magic: The Gathering previously promised they would not reprint, he claims it causes him personal financial harm. 

This shows a fundamental (and perhaps willful) misunderstanding of the TCG ecosystem. Reprints are widely considered a necessary part of cultivating a thriving playerbase, how else will new players buy into the hobby in six month’s time, or five years down the road? Walk into any brick-and-mortar, and you’ll see Magic: The Gathering booster packs and preconstructed Commander decks dating back several years because most game pieces are produced to have zero value to collectors but serve instead to entice passersby and introduce new players to the game. This is true for literally every TCG in the market, from Pokémon to Yu-Gi-Oh! to Flesh and Blood. Even sports cards—the eminent cardboard collectible—occasionally reprint rare and valuable items. Wonders of the First is adamant in cutting off its nose to spite the face, forcing any future prospective player to contend with secondary markets. 

Though Wonders of the First’s promotional material tactfully balances gameplay and collectibility as equally important goals, French’s perspective is still deeply ingrained in the company’s policy—one spelled out across several hour-long explainers and hype-building Discord messages. Alongside no reprints, French alleges Wonders transparently guarantees a collector’s investment by giving some collectors intellectual property rights to the game’s characters via random booster pack inserts, called Character Proofs, which are attached to NFTs. This essentially amounts to sub-licensable ownership of a character, complete with AI generated art, attached to a digital receipt. All of this is, as French is fond of saying, is in no way associated with Wonders of the First, the actual card game. This is a collectible perk and will have “no bearing” on the CCG, per the Wonders blog. 

The FAQ additionally states that their “community owns the IP Licensing rights for character art.” (Again, AI-generated art, which cannot be currently copyrighted in the US.) “We track Character Proof ownership using the Ethereum Blockchain,” via NFTs, a fact that’s not mentioned in this explainer. They sell this with an incredulous riff on Pokémon, saying, 

Imagine in 1999 if you hit a very special Pikachu insert that allowed you to have IP rights to the character. The Pokémon Company still owns him, but you own certain rights that allow you to print him on t-shirts or open a kid-themed Pikachu Restaurant chain. This is our IP framework in a nutshell.

French frequently compares buying into Wonders of the First now to investing in games like MTG and Pokémon in the nineties, but with significantly more assurances that Wonders will respect collectors. Unlike TCGs, which reprint and devalue cards and do not offer IP rights, French likens Wonders Character Proofs to an investment in sports cards (of which he is an avid collector) but with the additional assurance that an investment in a Character Proof will be more secure than an investment in sports cards because there is less risk of someone’s personal life affecting the value of the card. “Pikachu,” he says, “doesn’t beat his wife.”

Absurd rationale aside (controversy surrounding plagiarism, AI art, and personal actions frequently affect the popularity and monetary value of certain cards), it was the ownership methodology behind the IP-attached Character Proofs that prompted Kickstarter to cancel the first campaign on May 9, according to the Kickstarter spokesperson who talked with Rascal regarding Wonders of the First. The crowdfunding platform attested that the NFT-attached Character Proof cards “were in violation of a rule that prohibits projects involving financial services, money processing, [and] credit offerings.” French disagreed, contending that these serialized NFTs are not equitable to stake in the company and stating on the Wonders Discord that Kickstarter’s “section on various financial instrument definitions… don’t remotely cover our Character Proofs in any remotely good faith manner.”

Are these NFTs proof of (financial) stake in Wonders of the First or just a POS

The NFTs that Kickstarter took issue with are not just tokens, but are investment-oriented Character Proofs with IP ownership attached. This IP ownership is a part of the CCG’s marketing strategy to promote collectibility, meant to increase the value of an investment—both physical and digital—rather than improving, or even impacting, gameplay. 

So, following this line of thought, when card collectibility for Wonders of the First goes up, one would assume the value of these NFTs would also go up. There is a logical reason for people to be interested in the financial success of a company that directly affects their investment in NFTs associated with that company’s product, even if these NFTs are not legally considered an equity stake. When the Kickstarter was put up a second time, the NFTs were removed from the booster packs, per their request. However, these NFTs still exist on the blockchain, and many are currently being actively traded on OpenSea.

It’s extremely difficult to deny that NFTs—alongside other and Web3 technologiesy, such as the blockchain and artificially generated art—is a massive underpinning to this endeavor, and this project likely could not exist without it. In December 2022, Blokpax published its first look at the Wonders of the First project on Substack. A great amount of space is dedicated to reassuring readers (which is at this point a mostly NFT-focused audience) that Wonders of the First is historic, and therefore highly collectible, specifically because it is the first token minted on the proof-of-stake ethereum blockchain post-merge—hence the “first” in the name.

“Pikachu,” French says, “doesn’t beat his wife.”

French has a history of claiming historic firsts and lasts in the blockchain space. For context, in late 2022, ethereum shifted its valuation and .eth dispersal coding from the ecologically devastating proof-of-work mining to the more sustainable proof-of-stake attestation—this is called the merge. Full disclosure, the average person does not care about Web3, and the difference between these two methods of generating bitcoin doesn’t functionally matter, and certainly doesn’t matter to the world at large—the important thing to know is that proof-of-work is “pre-merge” and proof-of-stake is “post-merge.” But to Blokpax (and, by extension, to Wonders of the First) the distinction between ethereum’s outdated Proof of Work blockchain and the current Proof of Stake blockchain is very important. 

Blokpax alleges that their NTF collection Lost Miners of the Ether are the last tokens minted on the now-nonexistent Proof of Work blockchain and that Wonders of the First are the first tokens on the post-merge Proof of Stake blockchain. Both of these claims are disputed. When it comes to lasts and firsts, nobody but Blokpax is talking about Blokpax. This lack of import is not surprising, but it does paint a vibrant hue of desperation across Blokpax’s communications.

In the Substack post, Blokpax stated: “The actual [Wonders of the First] tokens from the first [proof-of-stake] collection do not have utility. They are not game pieces. They are collectibles that establish the WotF universe.” 

It’s at this point Blokpax claims they minted 10,000 tokens in this first post-merge block for Wonders of the First and said that, “once the world comes alive, Blokpax will be using the IP to develop a native Web 3 [sic] Trading Card Game (TCG) with annual releases, updates and ongoing development.” In late 2022, at least, the intention was to create a TCG that was intimately tied to NTFs, the blockchain, and other Web3 developments. 

 There is no prompt you can feed into an AI algorithm to produce culture.

Blokpax continues, implying that lore and story associated with any artwork attached to these tokens will become the intellectual property “owned” by the person who holds the token. This is similar to the IP rights granted by the Lost Miners NFT block where “holders are granted irrevocable personal and commercial use of their artwork,” according to the white paper. Obviously, if nobody cares about your Lost Miner, these licensed rights are essentially useless for all but pay-to-print tee shirts and mugs you can give out to family members at a White Elephant party.

While Wonders of the First would like to think that the selling points for normies include the gameplay and great art (French has asserted he would absolutely hang some of this AI art in his home, right alongside Black Lotus sketches) it’s much more likely that French is primarily interested in selling to his core Web3 investors. The continued emphasis on rarity and exclusivity (as if those words automatically mean intrinsic, universal value) make this clear. It’s an overinflated sense of importance that leads someone to insist that their brand—only officially set up in South Carolina in February of this year—will generate a community that can be extricated for value. It’s the kind of hype machine that rocketed NFTs to values of six-to-seven figures in its 2021 heyday. It’s an investment bubble that will always burst when people realize that they’re just selling to each other, and the currency of the day is collective hype. 

One only has to look at sales for Wonders of the First Character Proofs on OpenSea to see that a segment of the game’s collector market hasn't got the juice. 

But regardless of the viability of the NFT side to this business, there is another part of the Web3 melange that French staunchly defends; his love of the AI-generated artwork.

The AI-generated art is a bad look, and bad looking

In an unlisted YouTube video dedicated to showing off the art, French frequently extols the excellence of these pieces, that he could see this in a gallery “if it were hand painted” and fails to see the irony of this. Kris Kish, the creative director for Wonders of the First, should be embarrassed to have his name associated with such unearned hyperbole, but he powers through the video, gamely ignoring poor execution, style inconsistency, the absolute nonsense that passes for “lore,” and dozens of other compositional issues that anyone with even a passing knowledge of game art would be able to identify.

Below are a couple examples of art from Wonders that French thinks is not only acceptable, but good. A vampire skull with three front teeth between incisors. A book with a decorative cover depicted with four different corners. French praises the art direction on the Chiaroscuro Market (a sci-fi greco-roman open area with an atria and no market to speak of), saying it’s “on theme,” but in this card there is neither true black nor true white, but a muddy gray-and-yellow that is emblematic of AI art, which seems to reject true contrast in favor of soft washes of color. All of these cards boast nonsensical details, inaccurate backgrounds, and retain artifact renders that no artist worth their salt would ever include in a final product. The art of Wonders is of low effort and low quality, and no amount of touch ups can make up for the inconsistencies, poor perspectives, stylistic anomalies, bad physics, and poor color choices. There is no cohesion except through shared delusion. 

Wonders is attempting to speed run success, hoping to abbreviate the timeline between their first print run and a profitable game. In the same video, French and Kish admit that without AI this game could not have been developed within their eighteen month timeframe. They have nearly 10,000 pieces of art (using that term loosely) and state that Wonders “would have taken five more years” to do if they had actually hired artists to produce real art. 

Even the worldbuilding feels like LLM compost. It’s touted as science fantasy-meets-Medieval vibes with Latinate names, topped off with submachine guns and dragons, all utterly without direction or deliberation. It’s Mad Max meets Lord of the Rings, but completely removed from context. What is the point? It took 30 years for Magic: The Gathering to build up to 5,000 characters, and French brags that they did it in 12 months, showing a complete lack of care or interest in the actual structures of sustained worldbuilding and instead hoping that “fanfiction” can fill in the blanks, banking on community generated content to do the heavy lifting when they couldn’t be bothered, too obsessed with the idea of being more collectible than the biggest card game in the world. 

Community, culture, and collectibles

It’s this eagerness to be as successful as quickly as possible that leads to rushing through the process of building up a community organically; both through local game store buy-in and actual community support. At the town hall that Rascal attended in mid-May, French stated that he had about a dozen local game stores interested in purchasing Wonders of the First, that they were on track for a physical release before the end of the year, and they had seen card proofs from the factory. 

The math is not mathing. $1.2 million from Kickstarter, at least $200,000 on ads, free US shipping to retail distributors, upcoming print runs, packaging, and backer fulfillment to over 2000 supporters. Plus, just announced on the Discord is a new “pre-printed print and play” promo that will allow people to purchase print-and-play decks directly from Wonders, with a first run delivery by end of year. From the outside, the logistics do not add up. This is not how a typical TCG operates, and again hints at the insular boom-or-bust mindset that Web3 often engenders.

Let’s not mince words: it’s difficult to launch a new card game. A company must build an audience of players and sustain them over a long enough time period to establish a thriving community. Both Ravensburger and Fantasy Flight Games printed a limited number of Lorcana and Star Wars: Unlimited sets, respectively, out of concerns for flooding local game stores and online retailers with too much product. These established companies with long histories in the tabletop industry played it safe upon release, hedging bets and leaning conservative when estimating the popularity and success of their new games. And even with all this prudence, Ravensburger fumbled their initial set, The First Chapter, thanks to distribution issues.

Collectibility often derives from TCGs’ special inserts, alternate art treatments, serialized runs, and rarity scales. MTG has cornered this market of late but learned plenty of tricks from the Pokémon TCG’s model of dirt-cheap basic pieces supported by a plethora of rare inserts, called “chase cards” by the community that keeps them eagerly cracking booster packs. If every card is guaranteed not to be reprinted, as WotF promises, you create a scenario in which the only way latecomers can join the hobby is by purchasing cards from already enfranchised players—when your existing market is composed entirely of collectors sold on the idea of their cards gaining value over time, don’t expect the secondary market to be newcomer-friendly.

Truthfully, much of Wonders of the First is a decentralized internet evangelist's latest Web3 gambit moonlighting as a CCG. Folks really need to get in on the ground floor so they can scoop up as much of the first (and only significant) printing for themselves, ostensibly controlling the supply and, therefore, the resale price. IP ownership creates another financialization avenue, incentivizing players to both own the card and the IP for the character it depicts (both of which cost money unless you’re lucky enough to pull a digital deed from a booster pack or snag some of the very first that were given away as NFTs). Rich, satisfying gameplay isn’t totally absent, but is backburnered by electrifying promises that everyone’s cards are going to be worth so, so much.

French is determined to prove that digital collectibles are the future, and has invested significant time and resources into Wonders of the First.  He has made grand promises regarding the outsized importance of his NFTs that have, thus far, failed to materialize or create much of an impact beyond die-hard Blokpax faithful—an assumption that seems likely as only 2106 people backed Wonders of the First, and the average Kickstarter pledge was over $500. 2106… before you eliminate the people who backed twice. 

Who actually backed Wonders of the First?

There is some evidence that French might have been involved with self funding the first campaign on Kickstarter, although a spokesperson from Kickstarter said that these claims were not verified, and not a part of the reasoning behind the initial cancellation of Wonders of the First. In a tweet, French says that if members of the Wonders of the First team wanted Kickstarter rewards “they… had to participate with their own money with the community.” French said this applied to himself as well. There was a second tweet where French said that he purchased an uncut sheet with his own money, but didn’t specify if this was through Kickstarter or not, but considering it was a Kickstarter reward, one might assume the transaction occurred on the platform.

Additionally, there are multiple instances of people of the Wonders of the First Discord admitting to creating two accounts to get the serialized “special” boxes. French himself is aware of this, and blames the limitation of Kickstarter. All of the following screenshots are from different accounts and taken from their public Discord. While it’s likely there isn’t a significant number of backers that double dipped, the fact that an already-small backer pool is likely even smaller than the 2106 number on the Kickstarter is not a sign of a bustling community of players and collectors, but more likely a sign of an overhyped investment pool.

Regardless of the actual number of backers, French is so obsessed with bolstering the image of a bustling, organic community that he continually begs people to post comments in order to game the algorithm and drown out the detractors he characterizes as trolls. It’s easy to paint critics with this brush, and he does so liberally. One of the most obvious moments of brigading was when he told people to post memes on twitter making fun of a critic, offering prizes for “worst” meme.

French’s continuous pleas for good vibes alongside a call to focus on gameplay only serves as a distraction to the fact that people don’t care about gameplay if their other needs aren’t being met. One only has to look at the backlash Wizards of the Coast has received over this past year regarding artists using artificially generated art in their work to see that the hardcore gaming community Wonders hopes to draw from is not interested in AI art. Good games are a dime a dozen, and you need more than a moderately playable lane-control deck builder to get people invested. 

The future of Wonders of The First

Most of the card game’s fundamental assumptions set it up for failure: its original characters are AI-generated amalgams, the gameplay is largely unproven at a scale beyond the bought-in community on Discord and limited community playtests, and the team has not revealed solid plans for organized play or competitive support. How can they expect to compete on the same stage that houses Disney or Star Wars characters? The value of MTG cards such as Black Lotus derive not from the card itself, but the mythology constructed around it by three decades of social buy-in. There is no prompt you can feed into an AI algorithm to produce culture.

Like so much of Web3 technology, Wonders of the First is a solution in search of a problem, a self-appointed success in search of the money and people that they hope will bolster their claim with some truth. But that’s not how card games work. Interactive, competitive games require a community of players who gather regularly to enjoy the hobby, trading knowledge and cards, buying product or event tickets from their LGS and inviting in newcomers who look across the tables and think, “Dang, everyone’s playing Wonders of the First. I should check it out.” Collectible pieces come later, rare and valuable trophies that earn their owners prestige. But all of this presumes a healthy body of people interested in buying available stock (see the One Piece Card Game for a lesson in demand meeting woefully unprepared supply). Wonders of the First has no pre-existing anime or manga, video games, novels, or other media sustaining an existing fanbase. It’s a bunch of digital real estate obsessives trading ethereum back and forth within a closed market. 

While a month is hardly long enough to pass judgment on a card game’s longevity, Wonders of the First’s initial foray into the scene might be more indicative than most. The plan has always been to bend technology into the shape of an immediately popular CCG, rather than carefully approach organic growth. Wonders of the First is emulating the crypto playbooks of the early 2020s; a walled garden ethos that promises all collectors who come late to the party will not receive a goody bag (while subsidizing the cost of everyone else’s favors). Demanding high early investment as a selling strategy through Wonders’ first printing is a maneuver designed to make as much money as possible, even though there appears to be little publicly available information regarding any such growth plan; con attendance, competitive play, and how and when they might support local game stores. (How region-specific gamers will be targeted via geo fenced ads, however, has been discussed on the Discord.)

Maybe if Wonders of the First appeals to the algorithm often enough, the prompts might produce a game community for them. After all, cramming requests into machine learning models seems to be their only lasting strategy.