[WoW TCG] Have $300 to spare?

[Wiretwister]

That is an excellent point Frott. $600 for the entire set is beyond ridiculous IMO. If you like to play and have the money for it, more power to you, however, I refuse to pay anywhere near that.

As it was so obviously stated earlier in this thread, the vast majority of people are not paying Upper Deck this money because "OMGZ ITS AWESOME CARD GAM"... they want the in game benefit and status symbols. We all know that people are willing to pay real life money for gold, items, and power leveling for virtual gain, so it should not be surprising people are sinking this much money.

However, on a brief side note, Upper Deck has ALWAYS been pricey. I used to collect comic, baseball, football, and all other types of cards as a hobby. The hobby used to be popular in the late 80's and early 90's but they priced themselves out of business when they started charging $5-6 for one pack of cards (pack = 10 cards maybe?)

[frott]

I remember the Illuminati card game, when they came out with the "One of Everything" box for a fraction of what it'd cost if you'd try to gather them all. I guess that defeats the Collectable aspect of the game but then the collectable aspect defeats the playable aspect...

...maybe if I was still in school or could be bothered to go where people would trade these things. I massed a couple thousand dollar Magic collection from only purchasing 3 starter decks (and buying maybe 10 cards to construct a deck) just by trading and retrading.

But yeah, 1 of everything for $600 puts having a full playable set at minimum $2,400 and the sad reality is that you'd *still* probably not have a full "4 of everything" set and would need to trade that rare you got 17 of for the one you got 1 of.

Hee haw!

The game also looks complex just to be different from Magic... being based on heroes/talent specs etc. seems interesting but I'm not sure that making chunks of your collection basically unusable is a warm and fuzzy inducer...

[Kuro]

Winning tournaments is a good way to get your cards for vastly cheaper than pack price. I don't think I've bought L5R cards in the last 6 years, but I have a complete set of every playable card~ Hopping on tournaments early in the game's life cycle, when the majority of the playerbase isn't going to have the "zomg perfect" collection, is ideal, as you can win with your smattering of cards, and start amassing the cards you need to make the "zomg perfect" collection.

Or you can just use the card database to figure out what you want to play, and trade/buy individual cards to build a strong deck without having the giant pile of worthless cards that probably make up the other 300 cards of the set, for what you're playing.

The Large collection of seeming "crap" does come in handy eventually though, I've seen many times in CCG life cycles where a "bad card" has randomly come out of nowhere to be an amazing piece of meta or a key to an insane combo, and then watched people scramble to get a playset of them.

I usually use the "pre-build the deck, then actually get the individual cards" at the beginning of an arc of legality as the cheap seed for a collection, then use winnings to fill out the collection for later possibilities. But our area has robust tournament scenes, so it could really f'in suck for J-random dude with his 3 buddies in bumfuck nowhere trying to collect a complete set, but then, if you are J-random, you don't really need a full set unless you're going to be traveling cross country for tournaments.

[Jimb0v]

I think the popularity of the game being due to the turtle mount as opposed to the game itself is being overexagerated.

I guess time will tell which position is right, but I know in my area nowhere even has cards in stock for 100 miles and I know 6 different people that bought a case of cards (for playing, not for the turtle mount/points).

It seems like they have a good gimmick here because eventually the people who want to play with the cards will sell the in game items and points to the people who don't want to play. Meanwhile, the people who don't want to play will sell there cards to those that do.

Also, although the pricing has gotten a little out of hand because of the shortages in product, it will not take 600 dollars to be competitive in this game. Obviously you can't collect 4 of every card cheaply, but you very easily can build a single competitive deck by trading away all your other cards.

[Kuro]

None of our local players bought the game for loot cards hehe, they bought it because they wanted to play it after trying out the demo decks

[Thorbadin]

I bought 2 boxes to play myself, the amount of card you need to play by yourself is pretty high yeah but like all game that start off with a 300+ card set you will be expected to shell a ton of money to get the set. If you "sacrifice" a few classes and trade those cards for a class you want to play the outcome look much better. This is no different then when people started playing MTG back then and you usually went for 1-2 colors then expanded from there. I used to trade all the crap from white and green and mostly red to people that liked to get owned repeatedly by the unbalanced blue/black of the old days.

Some statistics I checked fast:
~112 rare in the set.
~22 epic in the set. Epics are twice as rare, so say are r1 meaning they appear 1 time on a sheet of card and normal rare are r2, appear twice.

That mean that out of ~246 rares, 22 are epics (22/246 = ~1/11.2) and 224 are rare ~91%, 9% chance of epic.

You have 2 chances out of 246 to get a particular rare card, that's 1/123 and 1/246 for a particular epic card. You will need around 10 boxes of 24 boosters to get a good chance of getting 22 epic card, but could get with less or more. By that time you will have something that look like double of all the other r2 rares. It should be way possible to trade your way to a set with alot less then 10 boxes though since you will have ton of spare r2 by then and the good rare will probably trade at 2 to 1 for a normal epic and maybe even 1 to 1 with the shittier epics. All the top class habilities are rare and I expect only the characters like the king, of jaina/thrall to really get high in price due to their nature and not necessarily their play value (Even though all of the epic characters are pretty monstrous by themelves).

So maybe 8 boxes, I paid 111$ can for 1 box so that would be in theory in the ballpark of 900$ can.

One of the problem with the game I think atm is the fact it's huge to try to go for something that look like 9 "colors" with only 361 cards. The allies are heavy in the set since they can be played everywhere. But it's only 15 classes card per class, 7 rare, 5 uncommon, 3 commons. 2 of the rare are limited to 1 spec so each side can only play 14 set cards. Some of them are not actually that good and won't make it in the decks once you get more card so you are looking at 10 different habilities for all your decks atm. The allies, the gear you use, etc, all add flavor but it's limited to the 1 set of 360 cards. Add in a few expantions and this will change greatly, I think for the better.

As for the game I personally like it for now and will keep playing it with friends for a while for sure.

[frott]

Yeah - the limitations on all the class/spec combos is what makes things nuts...

[Kuro]

Originally Posted by frott

Yeah - the limitations on all the class/spec combos is what makes things nuts...

Guild: "Choose a main and stop playing your alts!"
CCG Team: "Choose a class and start trading your useless cards!"

lol~